Taking It To The Textual Capacity

James Cavanah
DTC 375
Dr. Farman
Word count 845



Are fast paced world is full of new technology mixed with simplicity. This new culture is constantly on the move, finding the most efficient ways to communicate and we do this with words. Textual communication is ingrained into our bodies from an early age. We use are literacy and are textual knowledge in emails, letters, texting, advertisement, business and around the world experiences. We give directions, make rules, extend are education all through the use of writing. There is no doubt that our society is built on a foundation of textual history and will continue to use its traditional roots to communicate with all walks of life.

To say that we are Reverting back to are prehistoric ways as Mcluhan says, would be like everybody in the world switching there high speed internet connections back to dial-up modems. I don’t think I know anybody that has a dial-up connection, well maybe my grandmother who lives in her old 1955 thatched cottage in England. The old technology however, has a major impact on how are world has grown. If we take a step back in time to the Roman era we can see similarities from their world to ours. They formed the building blocks for academics, justice, law and religion, in which all of these would have never been passed on to other societies with out writing. In class we talked about the Rebus principle and how symbols eventually turn in to words using phonetics. This is show that we are an extension of our growing environment. If we wanted to say believe, we wouldn’t use symbol of a bee and a leaf, we would simply relate it with text. Other examples of how text can spread like wild fire, is the invention of the traveling press.

In class we watched “ The day the universe changed” by James Burk in witch he talked about a man by the name of Johannes Guttenberg, the inventor of the traveling printing press in 1450. Guttenberg revolutionized the way people got information and relayed ideas from one another. He made it easy for monks who were writing verses of the bible word after word. Now they could print, what would have took them one year to write, in two days ( Burk). Because of the printing press there was a mass media war over rules in the bible. Just like are culture people grasped on to the concept, with writing we can go back in time or read a novel that takes place in the future. Just like a novel you here people everyday say, “ the movie wasn’t as good as the book” because a book takes you out of realty into your own perceptions of the story.

Jacques Derrida would say that reading is not just reading text and that we extend our selves to see more. People everyday are constantly reading and using textual means to get their information such as the news, television and instructions. Derrida stated that “ there is nothing outside of the text” meaning that no matter how we look at things we will always revert back to text. For example, if we look at a court judge, he may be sentencing you to jail but all he is reading to you is words from a piece of paper. If we look even further he wouldn’t have had those rules with out the declaration of independence, which Americans laws are found upon. We can bring everything back to textual conversions and literacy. In the article “ A is for Ox” by Barry Sanders he relates how “gang-bangers” see the oral and visual world as the only one, making them outsiders in a literate world. “ If reading can be describes as “cracking a code,” then graffiti writing has incorporated that idea into script it self. Deciphering tags requires a specialized literacy (Sanders, 186). Sanders is conveying that if Thease “gang-bangers” have the talent to create their “tags” around the city then they have the knowledge to join are textual world and not reenact what they see on TV. With out there literal and textual knowledge they would not belong and continue to stay on the wrong path.

Our world thrives on the fact that we can get information at anytime and anywhere. Not paying homage to our old technology would be wrong but as we advance in to a digital age we will continue use are old remediation with no remorse, moving with forward advances in text and language. All of these factors explain why our culture holds textual knowledge at such high regard. Without text we would go to school and stare at pictures all day, we would not be able to pull out a Spanish dictionary to help us through a foreign county and are over all style of communication would be diminished to nothing.





Works Cited

The Day the Universe Changed. James Burke. 1985.
Sanders, Barry. "A is for ox." Vintage Books Oct. 1995: 155-86. 18 Feb. 2009.