the change that literacy creates in the way we think

[trochee]

Here's a note from my brother about this new book from JHU:

(the link contains the first chapter or so of "Information Ages" by Michael Hobart.) Here are my brother's comments:

i'm still not clear whether the author is full of shit or not, but he does
challenge some of my strongly-held internal prejudices (such as the
primacy of the idea of information), so i enjoyed reading his thoughts in
the excerpt here.

in particular, i thought you [trochee] might be interested in the ideas he's
presenting about the fundamental change that literacy creates in the way
we think about knowledge and communication, not just how we transmit it.  

just the other day i was asked "what era would you go back and live in if
you could" and for some reason, i came up with "the dawn of writing"
because i think that would be a fairly mind-blowing time (if you don't
mind the fact that it tended to be mostly used for accounting purposes at
first, anyway -- sort of like online-commerce today as opposed to general
digital literacy which seems less developed).  And then i stumble across 
this...

The ideas presented here are challenging (but wildly speculative) about the nature of how literacy affects what we believe about language.

Comments

[elwe.livejournal.com]

Looks like an interesting article! :: bookmarks ::

By the way, would you be interested in joining a group blog about language which maradydd and I and a few others run? It's mostly on hiatus for the summer (except for a few ocassional posts by me), but it should resume its normal schedule in the fall.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

Sure, I'm interested. How would I get involved? I'm starting to follow fieldmethods.net more reliably now but I hope to see who else is doing linguistics on the web as well.

I like how blogs allow some quick informal information-spreading -- Computational Linguistics is great, but it's kinda slow turnaround.

Sign me up; let me know what I have to do to get involveed.

[elwe.livejournal.com]

Excellent! I just need your e-mail address so the system can mail your an authorization password and such. You can send it to me at elwe@softhome.net