iteracy

It is argued that literacy has produced a transfo rmation in the way that society and community are constructed. Unlike oral communication, which is linked to a specific moment in time, written communication gives ideas a spatiality which they did not previously possess. When considering literacy we mu st remember that there is a distinction between scribality and printing. In scribality we find more of the interaction that is characteristic of oral cultures. Because many of the people do not know how to read, most texts must be read aloud, thereby pr oducing a situation of communal interaction and, possibly, debate. No matter how much debate occurs, however, a distance between author and auditor has been created. It was almost never the author of a work who would read it aloud to an audience.

A hierarchical order was also produced by the introduction of writing. Because the process of instantaneous debate was distanced from the production of knowledge, the creator of the text was awarded an authority which could not be instantly counteracted. This does not mean that anything that was written was automatically regarded as more important than an idea that was not. It does, however, mean that the writer was not able to be questioned about his or her statements by the audience without a significa nt delay involving a great deal of time and effort. The construct of reader/listener produced a structure of authority as well. The reader was set off from from the crowd by the action that he or she was performing.

With the introduction of print, co mmunication between far distant persons is facilitated. As the technology becomes cheaper and easier to use, the freedom to respond with opposing viewpoints increases. Concurrently, we see the shift from the communal reading of scribal culture to the so litary production of meaning of print culture. Out of this individualism communities of shared knowledge could be formed through the exchange of texts, but these communities had none of the spontaneous interaction of the oral community. Because a respon se to one text had to be formulated in another text, there was always a delay in the exchange of the ideas. Community was constructed on the basis of shared knowledge, rather than personal interaction. Scholars could refute each other's works without ev er having met in person.

Our current sense of community as a set of linear interactions between many individuals instead of amorphous networks may be due in part to the changes in mental models produced by the dominance of print technology. Much conce rn has been expressed in recent years about America's decline in community involvement. Robert D. Putnam has written a very interesting article on the subject entitl ed Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. Not all views of the future are so pessemistic, however. Future positive implications for the strucutre of community may be theorized by looking at ways in which orality is reflected in computer-mediated communication.

iteracy in Relation to
Computer-Medi ated Communication

Present-day methods of electronic communication have strong parallels to the transition between scribality and print experienced by Europe during the 15th century. As the medieval scholar hoping to find a certain tidbit of kn owledge, so too is the modern day web-surfer. There are no standards for what a web page should look like. The entire layout and design are up to the personal whim of the designer. Like the scholar, we encounter a document that is more often than not created with the convenience of the producer in mind, rather than the consumer. Compare Nick Arnett's description of surfing the web:

"We memorize strange access codes, path names, Uniform Resource Locators and other idiosyncracies of the v arious online sources. There are no standard title pages, tables of contents, indexes of punctuation, and there are few (if any, depending on your range) navigational tools that span the various islands of information."(1)

Another aspect of electronic communication, ease of distribution, emphasizes the similarities between the current Web/Usenet system and the introduction of the printing press. When Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenb urg he did not intend them to be widely distributed. The availability of print, however, made it easy for his words to be widely copied and sold. A similar situation exists today in the ease with which anyone can appropriate text from another source and add it to their web page or post it to a newsgroup. Once again there are no limits to who can "publish" a document provided they have access to the proper equipment.

For a more in-depth look at the ways in which early print culture is related to current electronic culture, read Mendicant Sysops in CyberSpace by Nick Arnett.

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Victorian capital graphics by Harlan Wallach, copyright 1994.
Molly Dolan