The world on paper, part 2

David Olson discusses ideas about communication, understanding, and interaction that are not only interesting but relevant to everyone, in every walk of life, in every place. Even as I sit here, watching the CW Saturday afternoon movie Contact, as Jodi Foster tries to explain the message from outer space and how it is to be interpreted, interpretation touches me. You could say it's the reason we're here, to try and understand it all--life, the world, the past, the present, ourselves, each other...I thought the fact that our modern understanding of the word "interpret" is the same as "to construe" or see in a particular light, while the older meaning of the word is "to reveal," "to understand." Sort of suggests that maybe the fuckedupness of the world could be related to our view of what truth is...we're all so modern and communicate with a million people from everywhere a million times a day, overpopulated, overstimulated, overworked, overpressured. Stay home from work one day and watch daytime television--between Divorce Court and Springer you'll see how shallow and pedantic we've become. There's too much to make sense of, and our making-sense skills have been corrupted. Makes one wonder what does matter, what is true, in the end, bottom-line.

"The seventeenth century view which many writers refer to as 'Modernism' was the invention of a new solution to the problem of interpreting texts; what these same writers refer to as 'Post-modernism' is recognition that there is no ultimate solution." I was happy to have this succinct handle of post-modernism, as it has become one of those words people just toss around to sound smart. I Googled 'post-modernism' for images only and found everything from crappy art to a naked woman doing a headstand. I liked this one for some reason:
Even Wikipedia says, "Postmodernism is an idea that has been extremely controversial and difficult to define among scholars, intellectuals, and historians, because the term implies to many that the modern historical period has passed," and warns readers of weasel words. How many other words and ideas and gestures have lost their black and white, becoming a gray mess dependent on the context and diplomacy of interpreters?

I thought Chafe's "idea unit" idea (unit) was interesting, but what if your idea consists of more than one noun phrase, more than seven words, and more than seven seconds? That's all a speaker's consciousness can handle?

On page 120ish, Olson talks about conversation implicatures, the stuff you just know how to interpret, the structures of interacting. I like how little kids make up jokes, knowing and playing with the rhetoric form of joking, but not making sense yet. My older brother and sister still tease me about the dumb unfunny jokes I told as a kid, and now my four year old nephew is doing the same thing. I also think that if we could keep our first-order metarepresentations like when we were kids, where we didn't delineate a different between what is said and what is meant, we'd be a little happier. Of course, the givers of messages would also have to have this naivete, a lack of wanting to deceive or confuse...I remember reading that I Love Lucy was the first television show featuring schemes and secrets of a housewife, intended only for humor, and how this show's impression of societal consciousness led to more widespread and unabashed dishonesty. Kinda of harsh on Lucy, but still an idea worth examining--how does what we watch and laugh at affect us? Has literacy done the same thing on a much more general, diluted, and unintentional level?

The world on paper, part 1

"Only in times of war do we allow ourselves the liberty of thinking that other societies are composed of or led by '"madmen.'"


So far I have read five chapters of Olson's book and am impressed at the vastness of writing's implications, touching on primitive cultures, the Reformation, Early Modern Science, heresy, Classic Greek civilization, art, memory, the alphabet, etc, all accompanied by a slew of writers and researchers. Unfortunately my own thoughts about writing are a little cranky right now, as the blog that I was working on about Olson somehow disappeared to the Island of Lost Documents. Thought I had saved it....nonetheless I am flipping through my heavily highlighted pages to toss up what I thought were the most salient and interesting points. Again. Actually, this has happened to me several times, I write what I think is a fantastic blog and somehow between composing and publishing, my mojo gets cross-modulated and I end up having to start from scratch. After the first two times, I began to realize that whatever crap I had written about my life or whatever was still there, it just had to be written again, and sometimes the second writing yielded better results, a clearer alphabetic picture of what I had in my mind anyway. I've always used writing as therapy, so I'm with Olson when he says Carruthers' assumption that "writing something down cannot change in any significant way our mental representation of it" is completely false, but her ideas about memory and writing as mnemonic arts sound interesting.

I wanted to think about my own concepts of writing and speaking before going on, in hopes that maybe Olson addresses them at some point. I am tempted to believe that words have a certain power on their own, and that saying words or phrases often can increase or decrease their power depending on the context in which they're used. The book spends considerable time discussing religion, specifically the Reformation. I was raised in a "Reformed" church, although I never really delineated our catechism from other denominations, I knew Calvinism and predestination had something to do with it, so I wasn't too jazzed. However, I do sporadically attend an Episcopalian church and feel a spiritual difference in myself, especially when reading from the prayer book, repeating ancient words and phrases, together, to God. Don't get me wrong, I have major beefs with organized religion and think that many, many terrible things have been done by Christian white men in Jesus' name, but this kind of communication does has transformative powers. After all, the Word was God and the Word became Flesh, right?

Another example--I attended the anti-Walmart rally in my neighborhood the other day. This was a case where a large number of people had a message to convey and did so by physically coming together, holding signs, maybe chanting...the cool thing was while I stood there, countless cars honked and waved at us, some giving the thumbs-up or yelling encouragement. They didn't know me, but they knew the context, the neighborhood, the story, the implications. I didn't know the people in the cars, I didn't know the people I was rallying with, but we all came together and communicated our message, without orality or literacy, really. And that feeling, the community-feeling, almost made me a little teary, a group of people trying to stick it to the corporate a-hole, supported by strangers of the same mind.

Anyway, the first page of Olson's book was fantastic--all the examples of just how significant and ubiquitous writing is. He makes his case clearly, and I like the quote on page 3, "The assumptions about literacy that we may have to abandon are not worth holding in any case. Indeed, they underwrite poor social policy and poor educational practice." Those are two compelling reasons why we should be discerning. The idea that literacy is not all it's cracked up to be is a frightening one. A cultural anthropology prof in undergrad once raised a similar question about agriculture (a dangerous suggestion when you teach at a school in the middle of Iowa) and if overall it was really a good thing. Seems like any new idea or invention is met with resistance and fear...it's no wonder we consider unfamiliar cultures "savage" or "heathen." I admire Olson for couragously posing ideas such as "Literacy is functional if one is fortunate enough to obtain such a position and not if not" (11) while also reminding us that the relationship between functional literacy and personal/social competence is not necessarily synonymous. In Chapter 3, Olson dissects the theory of Piagetian development as applied to cultural progress, pointing out that "all stable cultures are mature," and that a pyramid model of cultural stages would not have Western culture at the top. The voices being heard in the world for the last thousand or so years has been primarily rich white men, but more voices are being raised and listened to now.

Whether we're talking about literacy, orality, technology, writing, speaking, performing, whatever, what we're really talking about is thinking. I think, therefore I am. To do is to be. It's very basic and yet very complex. What with all the various facets and options of communication today, and all the information being thought, conveyed, and acted upon, it's no wonder we're causing the global warming. We make meaning, search for answers. I haven't read or seen this, but it was on Oprah....anyone?

"Whereas spoken utterances tend to indicate both what is said and how it is to be taken, written ones tend to specify only the former." (pg. 91) Ch. 5 described how texts are to be , and Olson discussed many deep ideas such as the functionality of non-literate cultures, the concept of verbatim and how it relates to memory, and how we construct truth. Rosaldo's claim that "what is true is what one can get another to accept, not an objective account of a pre-existing fact," is certainly evidenced in our world of truth and lies. And again, ethnocentrism is echoed on pg. 100, where Olson writes, "It is we, modern literates, who hold special beliefs about reading and interpretation that make other orientations to writing seem faulty or primitive.