Changing Literacy
The idea of coding our thoughts and committing them to a substance has changed human society and behaviour. I find it fascinating that people decided to develop a series of symbols to communicate their thoughts to others in different times and different places. As these practices become more developed new technologies of writing were developed with and urged on a variety of social trends.
I think the printing press changed our society by putting the printed word everywhere. Since it was easier for written works to be created and distributed, more people could access them. One important development was that with the printing press all of the copies would be the same, this would facilitate conversations between scholars because they could discuss the same content. In this way it would have promoted a more literate society because the scholars would have written letters to each other, but they would also be publishing their thoughts on the ancient works that were being printed which would be read by others. However, I think that the really effect on literacy occurred after the industrial revolution had mechanized the process of printing. Since it was even easier to print text, it was more affordable; however, this effect occurred later once labor laws about children’s working hours went into effect (Lemire, 2013). I think the most important publications were the newspapers in the Victorian Era. By this point more children were able to attend school (Lemire, 2013) and there were numerous papers which were printing a number of different types of literature beyond the news such as a large amount of poetry, including poetry by local poets and the famous serial novels (Hobbs & Januszewski, 2014). This would have encouraged people to work on their literacy skills because it would have been exciting to read stories and poems and I imagine there would have been conversations in the same way we talk about the next episode or season of a popular TV show.
One of the most interesting developments in the progression from an oral to a literate society I think is how the writing style has changed over time. Even if you read literature from the 18th century, you can see how much more direct our writing is now, it does not follow many of the oral traditions. You can also observe that the general population has become more literate because our written language is changing to match the spoken language and further itself from the Latin roots because certain grammatical rules are falling out of favour (Birner, 2012).
It is interesting to observe how our language is changing with the increasing use of digital technologies. It seems like we are increasing the amount of printed communication. It is easy to self-publish a book online, we communicate more often using text than voice, and we often talk with strangers about events without ever meeting them or hearing their voices. It will be interesting to see what sort of developments occur as we use and rely on digital technologies to write.
References:
Birner, B. (2012). Is English changing? Retrieved from http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/english-changing
Hobbs, A. & C. Januszewski. (2014). How local newspapers came to dominate Victoria poetry publishing. Victoria Poetry, 52(1). DOI: 10.1353/vp.2014.0008
Lemire, D. (2013). A Historiographical Survey of Literacy in Britain between 1780 and 1830. Constellations, 4(1). Retrieved from http://socialiststudies.com/index.php/constellations/article/view/18862
Image:
Franklin, R. (2006). Old Les Mis, Retrieved from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rfranklinaz/150250130
That’s a really interesting observation that we are becoming more and more direct in our writing. I tend to agree with you especially about literature. It seems that writers are less focused on metaphor, poetic elements and in allusion, and more on straight rich description. In non-fiction texts, I would suggest that historical texts like Aristotle or Descartes were quite direct in their writing. The Dutch philosopher Spinoza wrote his Ethics in something akin to Euclidean geometry. It’s quite direct and a reader can usually predict from the first half of the book the second half. So I would agree about fiction and that might be a product of our poorer historical and cultural memory.
About evolving language, I think your right on that we change our writing to match our spoken language. We incorporate many new words and ideas from other languages in English. That has been occurring though since the Angles, Saxons and Jutes settled in England. They incorporated some Celtic words, then Norse and later French into the oral then written language. Although, I think the direct speech and thinking associated with writing has gone the other way. In highly-literate societies it seems there’s a tendency for being direct and how we using propositional logic like Ong (1982) mentions. So it seems to go both ways but with different elements of speech and writing.
(When I was in China, I found out what ‘kowtowing” comes from. Fun adopted words!)
Hi Catherine,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the past few readings. I liked how you made note of the fluid and ever changing nature of language, and how it ebbs and flows with the progressing of society. In particular, your observations about how technology today facilitates self publications is a poignant one, as just about anyone can create an ebook and have it distributed worldwide with ease (whether or not anyone will read it is a different matter altogether however). But what are the implications of these developments for English language moving forward? And as teachers, what should our role be in stemming or facilitating the changing dynamics of language?
I think what spurs my questions are more anecdotal than anything. Over the past number of years I have seen students use ‘text speak’ more prolifically in their writing. My immediate reaction as a teacher is one of horror – how could students think that it is appropriate in academic writing, to use colloquialisms? However, upon completing the readings I have since began to reconsider my intentions behind my opposition to students communicating in informal ways.
In a previous course I had done some reading of Vygotsky’s work on language and the impact it has on thought. One conclusion he draws is that: “the relation between thought and word is a living process; thought is born through words” (Vygotsky, 1986), and so as long as students are not hindered in anyway by the changing nature of language and their usage of it, in terms of their development to be critical, free-thinking members of society, perhaps I should be more lenient with them.
—
Vygotskiĭ, L. S., Kozulin, A., & MIT CogNet. (1986). Thought and language (Translation newly rev. andit ed.). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
The tendency to communicate more visually is likely a consequence of the habit of multitasking and the culture of communicating remotely with others while watching something else, talking or listening to someone else or performing another activity. Oral communication is not possible or is significantly more difficult while multitasking and the culture of our world today does not always allow for orality even when it is desired. Ironically, orality calls for commitment of attention and literacy and textual or visual communication allows for the luxury of multitasking.
The evolution of visual communication is currently moving beyond just text. Emojis photos and comics are some of the examples that demonstrate the tendency of society to communicate with images rather than text. Applications like Instagram, FaceTime and others facilitate such visual communication and although they integrate text through features like “hash tagging” visual communication is no longer limited to text.
Bolter (2001) also makes the claim that “hyper media [is] regarded as a kind of picture writing”The kind of expression that hyper media affords often allows individuals to become very creative in a way that can only be achieved by a select few through writing.
Lastly, the phenomenon of speaking to strangers without ever meeting them is one that is most fascinating about our current ways of communication and perhaps also the most worrisome. This connection with strangers is ironically the reason why we have less time for connections with those we know and why often we choose visual communication over oral communication.
Bolter , J. D. (2001). Writing Space: Computer, Hypertext and Remediation of the Print. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.