Orality, the book, and the computer: What happens to 'literature'?
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Orality, the book, and the computer: What happens to 'literature'?
What will be the fate of reading? I don’t mean the left-to-right movement of the eyes as we take in information, but the age-old practice of addressing the world by way of this inward faculty of imagination. I mean reading as a filtering of the complexities of the real through artistic narrative, reflection, and orchestration of verbal imagery.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Lael Johnson and added
The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Sven Birkerts • 8 highlights
amazon.com
I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities
... See moreSven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Kojo and added
So why is reading books any better than reading tweets or wall posts? Well, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, you need to put down your book, if only to think about what you’re reading, what you think about what you’re reading. But a book has two advantages over a tweet. First, the person who wrote it thought about it a lot more carefully. The book is... See more
The American Scholar • Solitude and Leadership
One of my favorite lines from Walter Ong's classic book, Orality and Literacy, is "Writing heightens consciousness." I think that applies to what you're describing about the nature of conversation. Writing, that is externalizing thought in this quasi permanent symbolic way, makes us more aware of its nature and possibilities than the exchange of ev... See more
Uri Bram • L.M. Sacasas on Instant Messenger Over Instant Messenger
sari added
For the sake of post-nutshell clarity, assertions like literature is inherently more serious than games boil down to two anxieties, one material and one aesthetic:
1) The underfunding of the humanities. As college deans and corporate executives shred venues dedicated to reading, writing, and the instruction of reading and writing, many of literature... See more
1) The underfunding of the humanities. As college deans and corporate executives shred venues dedicated to reading, writing, and the instruction of reading and writing, many of literature... See more
Mason Andrew Hamberlin • Even When You’re Not Playing, You’re Playing: On “Critical Hits” — Cleveland Review of Books
Did the way the text was presented allow you to notice or think about the actual information captured in the text as you would like?
Reading is an active effort.There is a lot of thinking going on in our heads when we read a text, but we don't get a chance to mirror - and build on top of - basically any of it while we read. We have to hold it all in... See more
Reading is an active effort.There is a lot of thinking going on in our heads when we read a text, but we don't get a chance to mirror - and build on top of - basically any of it while we read. We have to hold it all in... See more
Marko Bogdanovic • Library on Mars - What, Why
Tanuj added