Blog #2: oral culture to print culture and back again... have we come a full circle?

Topic: Many scholars believe that we have moved from living in a "print culture" to living in an "electronic media culture" which is in many ways more similar to an "oral culture." They argue that people now get most of their important information from "conversations" on radio and TV. Would you agree or disagree with this? Why?

I think that I disagree with these scholars. While many of us receive information via electronic media, how many people communicate through conversations more than print/reading? I know that just watching students in class, so many people are communicating via text message and email. In my opinion, these forms of communication are forms of a “print culture” which we are clearly still immersed in. Even watching TV or the news, we have to read the TV guide to discern which programs appeal to us. We must read the sports highlights at the bottom of the screen on ESPN to find out how the competition is faring. We read the headlines as we walk past newsstands and tabloids in the grocery store to discover the new hot gossip and breaking news stories. On the news at night, they always have the important details of stories written on the screen so that we can comprehend what is going on in the world around us. They provide video footage and photos to help us understand, but we get the main points of the story from what is written. Even on the TV, our weather warnings are typed across the bottom of the screen. We are clearly in an “electronic media culture,” but I do not agree that our culture has descended the ladder back to an “oral culture.” Our culture has combined the best of both worlds to inform and reinforce what we know and learn everyday. Research shows that everyone learns differently. Some people prefer to read and memorize information, others like to hear what they are learning, while others like to learn in a more hands-on manner and see what happens. Our culture has combined all of these learning techniques to effectively transmit information to our society. We have not gone back to the “oral culture” of our ancestors; we have learned what works for us and applied our knowledge to create a hybrid culture of our own.