Literacy is such a basic concept of human life today that few people ever question its usefulness and debt to society. After all, without writing, there would not be books, would not be science, would not be literature, would not be computers, Internet etc. People predominantly derive their knowledge from books and the role of teacher diminishes daily. The new trend in education is to design online courseware and self-study software applications in order to minimize the amount the teacher has to spend with the student; this way the student can practice on his own and repeat the same exercise over and over until he acquires the required knowledge.
In one of Plato's most well-known dialogues, the Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus wonder beyond the limits of the city and there Socrates retells the following tale about the invention of writing.
"At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.
"Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of the he enumerated them, and Thamus inquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them.
"It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.
"Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality." (Trans. by Benjamin Jowett)
After telling the tale of the invention of writing to Phaedrus, Socrates explains that writing can never adequately convey speech because if the speaker is not there to defend his child, then readers will simply misunderstand it. In other words, writing does not encode all the information contained in speech, it is a one-way medium and does not answer any questions, nor does elucidate anything if there is uncertainty. But since the times of Plato writing became more than just a medium for transmitting verbal information. It became a visual art too. The early Christians invented the codex format by trying to make the copies of their scriptures more portable. This format served as the basis for the book as we know it today. To the scribes who copied the scriptures it was very important to make their works esthetically pleasing. The illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages, the notebooks of Leonardo, the diaries of other artists and writers are all examples of how textual information is beautified and enriched by its format.
Green
by Michelle Galimba
The poem is written on a background painted with water colors.
Manuscripts are very physical, have their own uneven touch, have their own script with certain lines slanting downwards and with corrections, subscripts and marginal notes. They aresingular and unique, irreproducible; they are as close as a text can get to its author.
The product of the computer age, the digital word, on the other hand, is stripped of all these attributes and encodes only the "phonetic" value of the text in the original manuscript. The handwriting, the color and smell of the paper, the smudges of ink, the little drawings on the margins, all is gone. But in this naked state, the text is liberated from all other constrains of size, edition, physical age, number of copies, etc, it travels across virtual galaxies with the speed of light, innumerable copies are generated in a blink of the eye, a single flat metal disk can hold the content of a school library.
And the benefits? In what way is it better for me to have all of the works of American literature together on a single CD; or all the English translations of the Bible, together with the Apocrypha and commentaries? Are the days of reading over and the role of text is shifting from providing information in grammatical sentences towards being digital databases? No man can ever hope to read all the material that is available to him. All he can do is to include them in his research by analyzing it and extracting information from it. Our age is the age of information extraction. We do everything but read: we gather, skim, flip through, browse, search, analyze, extract, retrieve, download, encode, tag, but amidst all of these activities, there is no time left to read. As a result, books written today are probably produced with the understanding that the "readers" will skim through them in an afternoon: the table of content, subject index, name index, bibliography, list of illustrations are all devices to aid the skimmer in his rush.
Sure, now I can go through the entire nineteenth century English literature and in a few second find out in what context was the word "discipline" usually used. I can find all the references to the Deluge in the works of the Church Fathers without engaging myself in extensive library research. Formerly, these kind of queries would have taken years, maybe a lifetime, of painstaking research and would have brought fame to the scholar; now a freshman can do dozens of them for his term paper.
But while it gets studies and searched thoroughly, the text is still not read, not to speak of being thought through. The scholar has the impression that he has gone through the entire corpus over and over and analyzed every aspect of it, but in reality he has only read part of the text and has little idea of what it represents in its entirety as a body of literature. As Socrates says, he "will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing."
By Steve Bekes