This is the kind of thing I’d like to read but ain’t never gonna watch. Literacy was a great leap forward from oral/aural culture.
Not only that, but this title is extremely click-baity. Roughly 95% of the time whenever I click on such, I regret it.
Plus there is zero explanatory text here to try to counter-balance the effect of that title - not even as a comment separately from the main post.
It is almost like OP, working in concert with OOP, is counting on FOMO on the part of the recipient to expend their attention on this video. Such manipulative tactics, even if mere laziness on the part of OP, reinforces all the more the feeling that I should not watch it.
This post has all the earmarks of an advertisement, despite being on the Threadiverse.
Maybe I truly am missing something by not watching this - perhaps, but I think I can live with that, and it’s not my fault that it looks identically to what an advertisement would look like.
Edit: since I went ahead and said all of that, I decided as a test to see if I was correct. And omg the video is so much worse than I could have ever imagined!🤢🤮😰 OP now blocked. I can’t stop anyone else from living this way, but I can decide to no longer waste my own time with it.
Literacy was a great leap forward from oral/aural culture.
Western chauvinism again. Oral history is as valid and accurate as written word in cultures that practice it.
That’s fine. In context it’s still a great thing. 100% of cultures relied on oral history 12,000 years ago. All cultures still rely on it for some purposes.
Literacy allowed the democratization of knowledge so that it no longer belonged to an individual. It allows information to accessed quickly and independently of another party. You can access information directly without the gate keeping of some authority, and you are in control of how you consume it, skimming, skipping irrelevant parts, stopping, returning etc. It is a more efficient way of imparting information.
Parts of this are true, but I’d push back against it being a full democratization. Literacy still requires training in a way that is unnatural (compared to spoken word), with distribution of and distruction of books and requiring someone to write it down are still gates. Books can be taken away from someone and also require additional material to create, in comparison to speaking doesn’t require anything but a memory and a voice. You can ask for a summary or of specific aspects of those sharing oral history, along with your other aspects listed, and once you hear it you’d simply remember it, as it’s been found that memory recollection is better in oral communities.
In our context here I can’t ask for nuff’n because it’s a recording. But this is part of the point - the medium had its uses. Recordings of Robert Johnson are more useful than either a verbal retelling of his performance or a written description.
Literacy is admittedly hard. It takes years of study and practice, and a society to support it. But it also takes years and a societal structure to learn an oral history. And it’s less efficient because it must be learned every generation.
It’s not a value judgement to say that the written word is a more efficient means of capturing and sharing certain types of information.
In our context here I can’t ask for nuff’n because it’s a recording.
This is not oral history, this is a recording. You have never experienced oral history within a society that practices it, so it’s hard to imagine.
And it’s less efficient because it must be learned every generation.
Same for written word. In fact, written word is so inefficient that one often has to take courses to understand it, every generation, by someone that practices oration (a teacher).
I never claimed otherwise, oral history is better at capturing and sharing different types of information compared to written language. They both have strengths, and the point I am rejecting is your claim that written word is significantly better, not that written doesn’t have its uses or is worth ignoring.
You have never experienced oral history within a society that practices it, so it’s hard to imagine.
You are incorrect on this point. I have pretty extensive experience with an oral history culture. I have worked, and for a time, lived in one.
I am not denying the validity of that experience or the value in that approach. But the fact remains that reading is faster than speaking, and the reader is in control without an interlocutor. You can skim or randomly access a text, and you can carry it with you. If information density is the goal, then text is the medium of choice.
The fact that you conflated a recording with oral history makes your claims of living in an oral history based society very dubious.
