"People in the 21st-Century western world tend to understand their lives as literary narratives with beginnings, endings, and dramatic middle parts. Did people think about their lives in this same linear fashion when they weren't literate? Probably not. Before people used writing, they didn't read books, and they didn't think in words. They thought more in pictures, and relied much more than does today's college student on experience, memory, and their own eyes and ears. You could say life then was less like a book and more like a Web page."
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This is the part of the article that I found to be the most aggravating. (Not to say the article bothered me, just this part really.) This assumption that one views their life as a literary narrative, is one that just doesn't ring true to me. To say that the cycle of life is literary, because it has a beginning and an end, seems absurd. Things were being born, and things were dying far before written language. In old cultures with a predominantly oral history, how are their stories less linear? I don't feel that being linear and being literary should be so closely associated.
So sure, people probably thought more in pictures back in the day than they did now, but doesn't an understanding of a spoken language make one think in words? Word association alone should make one do that. I don't really understand why the author describes the way people used to think as similar to a web page. Most web pages are filled with text elements.
Though I do agree with the points made about the usefulness of new technologies in learning. The presenting of the Tapestry in a digital form allows a closer inspection than one that would be given in a book. In a book the tapestry would have to be shrunken down and reproduced upon many different pages. A scrollable, digital version allows for a viewing of the whole tapestry in any way that one chooses. With links to info regarding any section only a click away, one's view ends up being more of the tapestry as a whole and less of a simple progression in one direction through the piece.
So the newfound ability to associate the visual elements of information with the textual, is one that is quickly influencing modern education. The branching elements of hypertext learning allows for better ease of use. I think that eventually most schooling will end up being presented in a similar digital fashion. It would seem to be an important advancement in helping to grasp knowledge. New technologies such as this are changing the way we read and write by enabling us to become more informed with greater ease.
1 comment:
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought the author's description of the pre-literate mind was a bit presumptuous. I had many of the same thoughts you expressed in this post when I read that passage. Having an understanding of a spoken language almost assuredly makes one think in words, but MacQueen apparently had to overlook that possibility in order to give her article the meaning she thought it needed. Also, I find it somewhat laughable that an obviously literate scholar might think he or she can accurately imagine and describe how an illiterate person living centuries ago thought about the world; it's difficult enough to imagine and describe how one's contemporaries view the world. Of course, in the end, I guess it's more fun to think of our predecessors as fundamentally different and drastically more basic than ourselves in terms of their thought processes because it allows us to perceive ourselves as that much more advanced and important than they may have been.
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