Literate Culture
The Western world was built on the written word. Meyrowitz (2005) shows how “[t]he rise of… a modern society is supported by, and further supports, the spread of literacy” (p. 37). Moreover, the written word defines a person that has literate roots. Ong shows that, “[w]ithout writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing by normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form” (Ong, 2002, p. 77).
McLuhan in Understanding Media writes about how the written word, first in the form of manuscript, meaning hand-written documentation, led to “the formation of the Roman Empire and the disruption of the previous city-states of the Greek world” (McLuhan, 2003, p. 128). McLuhan exploits the term speedup to describe the effect of a change in medium to increase the rate of information transfer. McLuhan notes that the speedup from oral culture to literate culture creates a center-margin structure (McLuhan, 2003, p. 128). He elaborates, showing how a print culture creates a system where a centralized locus of power governs the margins around it (McLuhan, 2003, p. 128). In addition, Joshua Meyrowitz (2005) shows that “while printing creates smaller units of interaction at the expense of the oral community, it also bypasses the local community in the other direction by creating larger political, spiritual, and intellectual units” (p. 37). The very core of the Western world is built on the written word’s speed and type of information delivery.
Furthermore, literacy affects the very core of the literate person’s thought processes. McLuhan (2003) shows that “even our ideas of cause and effect in the literate West have long been in the form of things in sequence and succession, an idea that strikes any tribal or auditory culture as quite ridiculous” (p. 123). In the Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan (1962) , states,
[t]he invention of the alphabet, like the invention of the wheel, was the translation or reduction of a complex, organic interplay of spaces into a single space. The Phonetic alphabet reduced the use of all the senses at once, which is oral speech, to a merely visual code (p. 45).
McLuhan sees the reduction of the event based oral culture to a static and visually weighted written culture as a reducer of experience. In his 1969 Playboy Magazine interview, McLuhan further notes that print culture changed oral culture’s “organic harmony and complex synaesthesia into the uniform, connected and visual mode that we still consider the norm of ‘rational’ existence” (Playboy.com, 1969, para. 34). Neil Postman (2005) notes that “in a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas” (p. 51).
Literacy also has some potent effects on time. Edward Wachtel (2005) notes “that space/time is a conceptual framework that we impose on the world to structure it” (p. 124). McLuhan, discussing the effects of the clock, notes that in order for the modern concept of time to dictate reality, “there has to be the prior acceptance of the visual stress that is inseparable from phonetic literacy” (McLuhan, 2003, p. 207). Continuing, he notes that literacy itself is an abstract system of labels, which separate reality into unnatural, discrete bits. Walter Ong (2002) discusses how “[b]efore writing was deeply interiorized by print, people did not feel themselves situated every moment of their lives in abstract computed time of any sort” (p. 96).
The evolution of manuscript culture into print culture also caused major changes in society. Strate (2009) investigates the future of human consciousness in relation to communication theories and notes that “[o]nly a highly literate mind could conceive of consciousness as an isolated island of subjectivity or hopeless prisoner of solipsism, and it is no accident that these philosophical movements materialized after the printing revolution in Europe” (p. 77). Walter Ong (2002) notes that “writing moves words from the sound world to a world of visual space, but print locks words into position in this space” (p. 119). Ong (2002) later discusses the transition further, saying,
Print embedded the word in space more definitively. This can be seen in such developments as lists, especially alphabetic indexes, in the use of words (instead of iconographic signs) for labels, in the use of printed drawings… and in the use of abstract typographic space to interact geometrically with printed words (p. 121).
Ong (2002) also notes how print led to the modern ideas of privacy, ownership of thought and word, originality and creativity, and fixed points of view (pp. 128-132).
