Z is for exactly

Zach woffinden

Dr. Jason Farman

LLT

19 FEB 2009

819

Z is for exactly

In the Beginning

A day in the life of Prehistoric Man: arise when the sun told him to, work when there was nothing else to do, eat when the stomach spoke, and sleep when the sun went down, repetitive, uneventful and solely relying upon the direction of others. Prehistoric Man may have had an incomparable memory, but the knowledge he relied upon and the beliefs his faith grew off of all came from a source of literacy. When referring to gang members who come from a background of illiteracy, Barry Sanders (1995) stated that, “Reading and writing would blow apart that space they so fervently guard, and force them to enter a new metaphoric space where they would have to confront who they are, and ponder what they are doing” (p. 160). I would argue that our culture is a culture based on literacy, because at the core of everything we do, there is a small group of those who are literate and without them our culture could not progress.

Connecting the dots

The connections between prehistoric man, faith, and gangs are the centrality of their “government”. At the core of each is the small group that can read and write. Prehistoric man had letters read to him and history recorded for him, the church taught people from a book only they could read, a gangs hierarchy always contains at least one person who is the ‘brains’ of the operation. Although as a society we may have moved away from literacy as a way of life and have reverted back into a more of a visual lifestyle, there will always be that small group that will carry on the traditions of the written word.

The Pope Rules
During the days the Church governed, people where usually taught by one man who read from one book. The Bible was inaccessible to the general public and the culture was created by a small group of chosen persons who read and interrupted the sacred text. Pictures where used to teach and memory was used to recollect (Burke, 1985). With the invention of the printing press, knowledge was thrown into the hands of the general public and people began o think and learn independent of the opinions of their preachers. Now literacy has roared into the change that we know today, no literacy no Constitution, no Constitution no laws; no laws, no rights; no rights, no freedom. Literacy has intertwined itself into every aspect of our lives, take it away and we go back to the days the Church ruled.

Knowledge is power

As stated earlier by Sanders, reading and writing, or literacy, creates an opportunity to open the mind and ponder on things, to thrive for knowledge. Sanders (1995) questions, “What prevents a young executive from turning his carefully polished SIG-Sauer on the other patron?” (p.167). The answer is literacy. Knowledge has been gathered to create laws that teach our culture that shooting a gun at someone is wrong, that knowledge stems form either personal research or second hand knowledge. In the movie “The Day the Universe Changed” (1985), James Burke says that letters where read publicly, and scribes religiously copied text documents. The knowledge to read and write where only held by a choice few, but without their knowledge and expertise, no one could read the letters, or copy the documents, in fact there wouldn’t be any letters to read or documents to copy, literacy ran Prehistoric Man’s world.

Visually Speaking

Today, literature is something highly subjective. If a page looks too cluttered then the reader passes it by, if ‘visually unappealing’ is what comes to mind the viewer losses interest. Now in a general sense society leans towards a more visual lifestyle. In reverting back to the ways of Prehistoric Man, Post-historic Man has taken the literature and doused it in visuality causing, once again, only a small choice group to hold the talents of literacy. Graphic Designer David Carson, is an example of how the text is not as important as the presentation of the text. Rather than reading the text a viewer simply has to look at the presentation and find a feeling of what the text is about. However, without the person who wrote the text, without the knowledge the author gained through literacy, there would be no text to present and David Carson might be out of the job, most likely no though.

Wrapping it up

Grouping the idea, that our culture is a culture based on literacy may seem like far-fetched idea due to the current thriving of visuality, but take a program such as Abode Photoshop and break it down. Like the movie “the Matrix”, the program becomes a sequence of 0s and1s a computer alphabet. Take it back further and the people responsible for creating the computer alphabet based it on their knowledge of the written alphabet. That alphabet goes back to centuries of symbols and letters gathered together to create words, phrases and ultimately cultures. Flashing forward to today, everything we do is based on our own or someone else’s knowledge of literacy, although you personally may be illiterate, like the Prehistoric Man, without that knowledge of literacy our culture could not progress.

References

Reisz, Richard. Burke, James. (1985). The Day the Universe Changed. British Broadcasting Corporation. 

Sanders, Barry. (1995) A is for ox. New York: Vintage Books.