“How could they possibly think that words that have been written down can do more than remind those who already know what the writing is about?” (Nehamas & Woodruff, 1997, p. 551)
This week and the start of Skim, Dive, Surface by Jenea Cohn marks the beginning of the end of this ILC, as I move into my final reading and start to summarize my thoughts for Evaluation Week. Skim, Dive, Surface examines the way that reading, learning, and general communication has changed throughout history to evolve into what we are now, a print-based learning society.
The first chapter, entitled The Chained Book: A historical overview of reading technology in higher education opens with an analysis of Henery Boughton’s 1878 painting The Waining Honeymoon. It depicts a young man and a wong woman sitting next to each other, though a few feet apart, on an outdoor bench. The young man looks contentedly absorbed in his book while his assumed new bride looks on at him. Zooming in on her eyes, Cohn describes her look as longing and lonely, but I also see a layer of jealousy and contempt, there is a level of anger for the technology that has taken her lovers attention from her. Behind them you can see two diverging paths, a metaphor for the ways in which they would live their lives, separated in the same painting.
Cohn uses this to pivot into a comparison of the present day, the pictures of families separated by phones and laptop screens, buses full of people with their headphones in. She does this not to shame the reader, or anyone in fact, for using these technologies, but instead to demonstrate that this fear as you may call it, is not new to our society, and that as long as communication technology has been evolving we have been at risk of losing the “learning from listening” aspect.
Oral learning is a theme that follows further into the chapter, discussing Walter Ongs three major eras, first orality, print literacy, and second orality. To cite directly “However, he says in an era of secondary orality, the impulse to communicate orally comes not from a particular need to communicate to a larger audience, but rather, out of a reaction to the inward thinking that print reading encourages” (1982 p. 134).
To reiterate, we no longer present information orally out of need, but out of wanting to spread ideas and discuss what we learn from text. I want to question here if there is a difference in the way we conversate if we are or are not taking written notes? I’m not sure if this is a directly correlated question but it does feel related.
I was also particularly interested in the idea of electracy. It is a word and a concept I had never heard of before and I think it summarizes a key aspect of my ILC work. “The concept of electracy can be defined as the new sets of skills and strategies necessary for a communicator to convey their meaning effectively with digital technologies.” (p.39) As we move further into the age of digital humanities, electracy may be the element of mastery needed for effective learning.
I will be taking a week off for Thanksgiving Break, and returning in Week 9 to finish this chapter and begin my wrap-up thoughts for this ILC. I am writing the continuation of this book into my Winter ’23 ILC.