= one of the main points of the lecture

• Preliminary Class Business
• Benjamin (continued from last lecture)
• From Prehistorical Information to the History of Information
  • (A) Understanding Oral Culture Based on the Retention of Oral Practices in Our Contemporary Information Ecology
• References

Preliminary Class Business

• Meeting this Friday for "specialization" in Literature and the Culture of Information: see announcement on English Dept. Web site for details

Benjamin

• (continued from last lecture)

From Prehistorical Information to the History of Information

• The purpose of this week's classes is to leave behind the prehistory of information to embark upon a review of the history of information, specifically, the history of previous "information revolutions" that can be studied to gain insight into our current information revolution:
  
  
  1. The Writing Revolution
     Transition from primary oral culture to writing ("chirographic," manuscript) culture
  2. The Print Revolution
     Transition from manuscript culture to print culture
  3. The Media Revolution
     Transition from print culture to electronic audiovisual culture
  4. The Digital Revolution
     Transition from analog, broadcast audiovisual culture to digital, networked culture
     
     (See, for example, Carol Pasternack's English 165SS, "Scroll to Screen" for a fuller examination of the history of information)
     
     
• The paradox we encounter in studying the history of information:
  
  
  • (A) We are helped in understanding previous ages of information because the history of information is not one in which each successive paradigm simply erases the board and starts over again. Rather, each new epoch of information retains important elements of previous epochs that are reconfigured and repositioned in the evolving system of information (what might be called the evolving "ecology of information").
    
    

    "Today the three kinds of information [natural, conventional, technological] are layered over one another in one place, grind against each other in a second place, and are heaved and folded up in a third." (Borgmann, p. 2)

    
    It is the residue of earlier information practices in our own information ecology that allows us to empathize with the past.
    
    
  • (B) But it is also precisely our assumption that we can understand past information practices based on the retention of reconfigured versions of those practices that prevents us from really understanding earlier information ages as they were actually lived in their own ecologies.

(A) Understanding Oral Culture Based on the Retention of Oral Practices in Our Contemporary Information Ecology

     Orality in the Workplace

• Example: The job interview
  
  
• Example:
  
  
  • Orality in the ecology of information practices in a traditional corporation
    
    
  • The evolving role of orality in a "team-based" organization
    (see Peter Senge on "Dialogue and Discussion" in The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, pp. 238-49)
    
    

• Example: The oral exam (cf., Ong, p. 115)
  
  
• Example: Class lectures and seminars

References

Supplementary links for this class on Study Materials page