(no subject)

[haptalaon]

Novice: Reads What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains as a meditation on the sacred necessity of Disconnecting from the internet and getting back to a more ancient mode of thinking and behaving

Book: "The oral world of our distant ancestors may well have had emotional and intuitive depths that we can no longer appreciate. McLuhan believed that preliterate peoples must have enjoyed a particularly intense “sensuous involvement” with the world. When we learned to read, he argued, we suffered a “considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would experience...Ong, in his influential 1982 study Orality and Literacy, took a similar view. “Oral cultures,” he observed, could “produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche.”

Master: Reads What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains as a meditation on the sacred necessity of Disconnecting, and concludes the only way back is to forget how to read.

Comments

[earthspirits]

Interesting concept.

[annofowlshire]

It’s true we can’t totally “go back” but perhaps we can capture some of it by putting emphasis on oral storytelling and communication.

I realize the irony of saying that to you in writing.

[irreversibly]

I wonder if the traditional Kalevala echo-singing thing applies to that at least somewhat. Most rural people in the times those stories were still actively told were illiterate. The songs of Kalevala were (at least sometimes) told in a way where one person (the storyteller, so to speak), first sings one line, then everyone listening repeats it, and then the storyteller continues with second line, and everyone repeats that, and so on and so forth.
It creates a different kind of engagement for sure, and definitely helps with memorizing the song for everyone involved. It's a kind of an impressive feeling to be part of that, too, not just part of the audience but an active part of the song itself. Even if you are technically the audience, in modern terms.

[annofowlshire]

I was thinking this morning that in a world pre-writing, but also before reading/writing is a widespread skills, one has to be better at memorizing and coming up with things in a way to be memorized. Stories. Recipes. Songs. Everything. We romanticize reading books over the Interwebs, but ultimately in both cases we have our noses and eyes pointed at something other than the world around us. (I tend to find that when I’m cutting down Internet I read books more—and I like that—but I’m just as disengaged with the world around me.)