Why We Write, or Don't: A Few Words About Culture and Change

[Squigglenob]

Despite the efforts of culture critics such as Neil Postman to warn us of the danger of allowing ourselves to be seduced – either by a particular medium or by the power of technology itself to change our lives in unexpected ways, human culture continues to embrace the changes to our lives – and our art – wrought by new technologies and media as rapidly as they appear. We embraced the telegraph, the radio, film, then television, and most recently, the Internet: all brought with them not only new methods of communication but also necessarily changes in the way we think about and use (or think we can use) information.

This has clear implications for our appreciation of language – the medium (in a slightly different meaning of the word) for writers – especially poets – for whom a word, to invert a famous saw, might mean a thousand pictures. So for my friend Sam, and to those like him who have felt the need to abandon this medium we all love so dearly – language – I feel especially pained. He and I gave talks in the late 1980's that warned teachers and professors all over the country that the medium we treasured – the written/printed word – would likely be subsumed by the power of other media delivered via newer technologies.

Never have I wished more that we'd been wrong than as I write this.

Read the rest by Jim Booth at Scholars and Rogues.