Cultural Communication in Textual Times

Shannon Mendenhall

DTC 375 - Dr. Farman

Word Count: 996

02/18/2009

It was writer Miguel de Cervantes that said, “The pen is the tongue of the mind” (qtd. in Cicada Magazine). For years people have been putting their thoughts and opinions on paper. Writing has been used for recording and transferring knowledge, and more recently for socialization purposes. Our culture relies heavily on literacy and text to ‘keep in touch’ with family and friends through email and social outlets such as Facebook and MySpace, and even to form new relationships with the introduction of online dating. Society used to function on a ‘word of mouth’ basis, but now a more common theme seems to be ‘put it in writing’. There has been a shift in our society from what used to be an oral culture to a now dominantly textual culture.

According to Andrew Robinson, writing first began around 3300 BC on Sumerian clay tablets (Crowley, 41). He states that it “hardly needs saying that a person who can read and write has greater opportunities for fulfillment than one who is illiterate” (Crowley, 36). Methods of writing continued to develop and grow until paper was invented in China in 105 AD (Crowley, 85). Paper then led to printing which, according to Lewis Mumford, “swept across the world” (Crowley, 92). As texts became available people everywhere were turning to written communication, and the world started evolving into a primarily textual culture. Mumford stated that “it is hardly possible to overestimate the handicaps of illiteracy; for that chains one to the world here and now, a form of cultural solitary confinement, fatal to human development” (Crowley, 94). Mumford and Robinson both make it clear that text is an essential part of human life. Knowledge is acquired through texts that are immediately and always available to those with access to either technology or books. A world that is reliant on the spoken word would fail to effectively communicate vital information. Life would once again be local. The “global village” that McLuhan speaks of in “The Gutenberg Galaxy” would cease to exist (McLuhan, 117). We do live in a global village today. The world that we know communicates by textual means. Americans get their news by textual means, whether it is a newspaper or the internet. Some may watch the news on their television sets, but what many fail to realize is that the news anchors are reading text to viewers. It is not just the news; much of socialization has become textual as well. Cell phones, which originally promoted portable long-distance orality, now promote portable long-distance textuality. Keys once used for dialing numbers have now been turned onto their sides to form full QWERTY keyboards. Individuals are turning to the internet for networking. These people are finding it easier to communicate with a greater number of people over a lesser period of time. Beyond socialization, throughout history education has been turning more and more to textuality. In “A is for Ox”, Barry Sanders argues that gang violence is influenced by the common grounds of illiteracy that is recognized in school (Sanders, 185). These “gang-bangers” then pull their sense of being from a traditionally “oral” world via the media (Sanders, 170). They become outsiders and are, in a sense, no longer a part of the society or culture that we know today. Without literacy, without text, they do not belong.

Socrates had a different view of education. In his story about the creation of texts, the king says to Thoth, “You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant” (qtd. in Crowley, 36-37). Socrates stressed the importance of educators, those who would orally transmit all of their knowledge to their student. The problem with such a method today is that members of society would end up knowing a lot about very little. This process would detrimental in a society that thrives off of knowledge. No person could be self sufficient because they would be reliant on the knowledge of other individuals, rather than the knowledge that they can seek out on their own through texts. As a society that is textual we gather our knowledge from a seemingly infinite amount of individuals through the written word. As the James Burke video, “The Day the Universe Changed”, points out, with the creation of writing people can know and do everything (Burke). Handbooks become instructors, and indexing results in interrelated ideas. Knowledge is much easier to acquire, serving as a great benefit for an expanding culture. Textuality enables our culture to become more educated because the ability to access information is much greater. Instruction is still necessary, but instructors can rely on the written world as a source of knowledge to communicate to students. Instructors can also provide written information directly to their students, allowing them to read it on their own.

Reading is another facet of textual communication. One individual writes and another reads. The reader then becomes the writer, resulting in two-way written communication. Jacques Derrida saw reading as more than simply reading text. He stated that “there is nothing outside of the text” meaning that everything is textual. Humans are reading all day, regardless of literacy. Derrida’s argument is that our interpretation of the world is a reading process. One example of this process is reading body language. Humans cannot escape literacy because they are constantly reading. Albert Mehrabian found that fifty-five percent of in-person communication is non-verbal body language (Mehrabian). This shows that fifty-five percent of what is considered ‘oral communication’ is in fact textual communication, helping to support the conclusion that our culture is textual.

Culture today is a textual one. Communication through both socialization and education thrive off of textual means. Individuals are enabled to acquire all types of knowledge, and they’re capable of communicating either that knowledge or other information to people around the globe without being in a face-to-face environment. Even in face-to-face environments, oral communication relies heavily on textual means with the reading of body language. As Derrida said, there is nothing outside of textuality. Our culture mostly relies on textual means as the dominant role of communication.

Works Cited

The Day the Universe Changed. James Burke. 1985.

Crowley, David, and Paul Heyer. Communication in History: Technology, Culture,
Society. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc, 2007. 36-94.

Cicada Magazine. 18 Feb. 2009 .

McLuhan, Marshall. Essential McLuhan. New York: BasicBooks, 1995. 117. 18 Feb.
2009 .

Mehrabian, Albert. "Silent messages: Implicit communication of emotions and attitudes"
'Silent Messages' -- A Wealth of Information About Nonverbal Communication (Body Language). 1981. 18 Feb. 2009 .

Sanders, Barry. "A is for ox." Vitage Books Oct. 1995: 155-86. 18 Feb. 2009 .