Government and Legal Institutions Maintain the Dominance of Required Textual Credibility

Kelly Collier Rauh

DTC 375: Language, Texts & Technology

Dr. Jason Farman

Essay Prompt #2

Word Count: 918

February 18, 2009

Government and Legal Institutions

Maintain the Dominance of Required Textual Credibility

Talk to Text

Everyone would agree we communicate and receive great volumes of information daily through both verbal and text-based media. Academic studies concur that our prehistoric ancestors communicated solely by spoken means, while the introduction of phonetic alphabets and the printing press produced literate societies relying heavily on printed text. Some sociologists claim now that we are coming full circle, returning to a new form of aural supremacy. I disagree. The Tri-Cities’ culture of 2009 is clearly still dominated by textual communications, as evidenced by the credibility standards and documentation requirements of our powerful government and legal systems.

Print in Power

Organizations with the most influential power place credibility on text, while discounting verbal communications. Two of these major “Ideological State Apparatuses” (Althusser 155) are our government and legal systems. In these sectors, the printed word is the accepted standard of authority—a trustworthy record over time—while verbal communications are considered less reliable and generally lacking validity.

Weight of Words

Our national, state, county, and city government’s local agencies are heavily burdened with paper-based text. For every event within governmental jurisdiction, forms must be filled and filed (alphabetically), converted to mass storage media (based on reams of written computer code), protected with layers of manual security policies, and made accessible only to those with properly documented rights. We accumulate, and house so many files that a significant portion of our tax dollars goes to support this heavyweight text. The Tri-City Herald ran an article in 2008 claiming, “Storage Options for Public Records Could be Costly for Benton County.” Budget padding needed to archive “about 5,200 boxes weighing more than 25 pounds each,” measures our textual obesity (Trumbo B1).

Events generating fat folders include births, adoptions, marriages, bankruptcies, divorces, and deaths. Your word alone is not acceptable proof. Oral testimony does not allow you to obtain a passport, community property rights, debt dismissal, license to remarry, child support, or survivor benefits. We accept the paperwork required to achieve the desired text-based outcomes. As Riesman observed, “The conformity of the individual tends to be dictated to a very large degree by power relations among the various…professions” (qtd. in McLuhan 124). Our government issues us social security, driver’s permit and license, voter registration, selective service, and professional license cards. It’s impossible to “talk your way into” receiving the rights conveyed by holding these badges of proof. We conform to print or we do without.

Speechless Dealings

We can complete some transactions through textual media in silence, without ever speaking to a government representative. As long as we have the proper documents to attach, transcribe, or copy for mailing, many tasks no longer require verbal components. Vehicle owners can renew licenses and transfer titles online. We can handle property taxes, real estate value assessments, and Local Improvement District (LID) payments through physical or electronic text, with conversation rendered obsolete.

Get it in Writing

Our legal system requires any relevant communication be in writing before it will “hold up” in court—be deemed defensible--for citizens’, law enforcement officers’, and lawyers’ protection. Trial judges frequently bring down the gavel with the pronouncement, “Hearsay!” for verbal, third-party testimony. It is frequently dismissed as invalid, when the same evidence in textual form could be considered by the jury. All verbal proceedings are also set in print by court reporters.

The “paper trail” created by a single, simple court case is often paved with hundreds of pages of filings, motions, warrants, subpoenas, statements, postponements, judgments, decisions, and receipts. None of these steps is legally enforceable if performed verbally without text backup. Attorneys will not agree to represent clients without signed contracts. Oral promises to provide restitution, cease and desist, or pay fees and fines would be viewed as comical and worthless if not committed to documents with hand-written signatures.

One in Four of Us

According to the Tri-City Industrial Development Council Web site, the Employment Security Department estimated 17,400 Tri-Citians worked directly for the government in December 2008, with over 12,000 more in government-affiliated or supporting research and development positions. That’s roughly one-quarter of the 124,220-person labor force cited. Many of these employees spend up to 100% of their chargeable hours researching text, creating, editing, formatting and distributing documents. Environmental Impact Statements alone run several hundred pages and commonly take months to generate before written approval can be granted for new projects. Government standards require verbal components also be documented, including emails to confirm meeting or telephone details.

Legal departments in both government and private entities hold management and staff to the highest standards of accountability: documented communications. Rising threats of rampant plagiarism and abuse of intellectual property rights—made easier by the internet—motivate more layers of printed peer reviews, manager approvals, library validations, and resource citing. Entire software systems, such as PNNL’s Electronic Records & Information Capture Architecture (ERICA), require specialized training, then hours of text input and follow through for every authored work. These tracking applications deal exclusively with the written word, authorizing publications, and recording the information path created.

Document It or Dismiss It

These legal and governmental examples show how the most powerful institutions in our current local culture place far more credibility on text-based documentation than on oral communication. The illustrations provide ample evidence that we comply with numerous requirements for paperwork, accepting that identical information transmitted verbally would be dismissed. These two institutions affect a substantial percentage of our lives, making us realize how far the balance remains tipped toward the dominance of text in our society.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation.” Trans. Ben Brewster. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Print.

McLuhan, Marshall. “The Gutenberg Galaxy.” Essential McLuhan. Eds. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone. New York: Routledge, 1995. 114-139. Print.

“Tri-Cities, WA Fast Facts.” Tri-City Industrial Development Council. Web. 18 Feb. 2009 <http://www.tridec.org/index.cfm?regid=%23%2F%40%20(%0A&fwnavid=%23%2F%40H(%0A&navMode=(%3FT%3D%3A(Y%3EJ%3B1%5C%20%0A>.

Trumbo, John. “Storage Options for Public Records Could be Costly for Benton County.” The Tri-City Herald [Kennewick, WA] 3 Mar. 2008: B1. Print.