This page contains materials intended only to facilitate class discussion (excerpts from online reading materials, outlines of issues, links to resources that may be mentioned in class, etc.). The materials are not the same as the instructor's notes for the class and are thus not designed to represent the full exposition or logic of the class.

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Marshall McLuhan, "The Written Word"

"Prince Modupe wrote of his encounter with the written word in his West African days: '. . . the marks on the pages were trapped words. Anyone could learn to decipher the symbols and turn the trapped words loose again into speech' " (84).

"Because of its action in extending our central nervous system, electric technology seems to favor the inclusive and participational spoken word over the specialist written word" (85).

". . . the change the tribal man experiences when he becomes literate. Nearly all the emotional and corporate family feeling is eliminated from his relationship with his social group . . . . it is the result of the sudden breach between the auditory and the visual experience of man. Only the phonetic alphabet makes such a sharp division in exprience, giving to its user an eye for an ear, and freeing him from the tribal trance of resonating word magic and the web of kinship" (85-6).

"Separateness of the individual, continuity of space and of time, and uniformaity of codes are the prime marks of literate and civilized societies. . . . Tribal cultures cannot entertain the possibility of the individual or separate citizen. Their ideas of spaces and times are neither continuous nor uniform, but compassional and compressional in their intensity" (87).

"As an intensification and extension of the visual function, the phonetic alphabet diminishes the role of the other senses of sound and touch and taste in any literate culture" (87).

"Today in the electric age we feel free to invent nonlineal logics. . . . Only alphabetic cultures have ever mastered connected lineal sequence as pervasive forms of psychic and social organization" (88).

"The auditory sense, unlike the cool and neutral eye, is hyper-esthetic and delicate and all inclusive. Oral cultures act and react at the same time. Phonetic culture endows men with the means of repressing their feelings and emotions when engaged in action. To act without reacting, without involvement, is the peculiar advantage of Western literate man" (88).

 

Patricia Ann Carlson, "Square Books and Round Books"

"Preliterate cultures actively construct meaning from all the sensual stimuli and rely more extensively on intuition and impression over logic and analysis. Literate cultures on the other hand, undergo a distortion in the ratio of senses--to use Marshall McLuhan's terms--until sight comes to dominate all others and rational/logical ways of knowing become pathologically efficient" (16).

". . . the polarity of McLuhan's typographic man and tribal man. Ironically, neither has the intellectual skills to survive in the Information Age. The former's serial processing creates too narrow a bandwidth. The latter's dependency on immediacy and intuition does not allow for adequate reflection and interpretation" (16).

"Hypertext has been variously characterized as nonlinear prose, interactive print, or dynamic text using electronic capabilities to overcome the limitations of linear, printed text. The two major elements of a hypertext system are: Modules--pools of information . . . electronically stored as nodes in a database. Webs--the pattern of links among the nodes" (16).

Print vs. hypertext

"Paper text (or flat text) provides only two dimensions of information processing: linear and hierarchical" (17)

"The phonetic alphabet and familiarity with print allows meaning to be stripped from the page without the intermediary of vocalization. . . . The portability of print also encourages what might be considered perversely isolated and solitary modes of reading, thus reducing the performance dimension of learning . . ." (28)

hypertext:

"text freed from the confines of the printed page" (17)

"text as an associative network rather than a monolithic, sequential structure" (18)

"information is transformed into environment" (18).

"rediscovery of the communal context of knowledge" = "return to tribalism" (28).

"Knowledge as environment collapses the distinctions between author and reader. . . . Other boundaries, like the chronological pigeonholing of events, may well collapse. Because the performance aspect returns, it is entirely possible that a cyberspace could be treated as a communal repository of information . . ." (30)

"In the 'integrated sensorium' of hypertext (and its extension, hypermedia), technological man can meanignfully enact the most pervasive, mythic scenarios of human existence. learning becomes an extended journay. . . . Knowledge structures become landscapes . . ." (31)

 

Tara Prindle, NativeTech

Across this vast Turtle Island, different Peoples developed and expressed their own complex technology. Often, the degree of craft specialization is influenced by the different environments people live in, or by trade and information networks -- these technologies are the product of thousands of years of expertise, oral traditions and continuity.

By asking who used what technology, who produced art, what was being made, and who was it being made for, you can start to appreciate the unique complex technologies of the different Native American Peoples across North America.

To interpret Native American art, one must identify who this art it is produced for and what messages it conveys. . . . Art conveys meaning with symbols and icons which are culture specific. There is usually no direct connection between the symbol and the object it represents. Symbols can have very different meanings to different cultures. As a result, to understand the symbolic aspects of art, one must know what the symbol means to the society which uses it. Artists must abide by the rules or conventions of their culture when they use symbols to communicate ideas. Often it is not possible to separate the everyday use of an object from the embellishment of that object.