John Connell: The Blog

He ate and drank the pre­cious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What lib­erty
A loos­ened spirit brings.

I won­der how Emily might have writ­ten this were she writ­ing today?

“So, no sur­prise that when we incar­cer­ate teenagers of today in tra­di­tional class­room set­tings, they react with pre­dictable dis­in­ter­est and flunk their lit­er­acy tests. They are skilled in mak­ing sense not of a body of known con­tent, but of con­texts that are con­tin­u­ally changing.

Teach­ers must recog­nise that our ped­a­gog­i­cal tools are incon­sis­tent with the skills needed to sur­vive in a world where peo­ple are always con­nected to every­one and every­thing. In such a world, learn­ing to think for one­self could well be more impor­tant than sim­ply learn­ing to read and write.”

These are the final cou­ple of para­graphs from an Econ­o­mist arti­cle enti­tled: From Lit­er­acy to Digiracy. The piece points to Mark Fed­er­man, of the McLuhan Pro­gramme in Cul­ture and Tech­nol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto, who has argued that the tele­graph was the first to “undo” the effects of the writ­ten word. As the arti­cle notes:

“If the tele­graph was the start­ing point, Mr Fed­er­man reck­ons we are prob­a­bly half way through a 300-year tran­si­tion out of the world of mass lit­er­acy. That world began when Johannes Guten­berg intro­duced the print­ing press in 1455, and gave birth along the way to the Ref­or­ma­tion, the Age of Rea­son, the Enlight­en­ment, the Sci­en­tific Method, and finally the Indus­trial Revolution—not to men­tion the mod­ern era of news­pa­pers, uni­ver­sal edu­ca­tion and, yes, mass literacy.”

The mes­sage here chimes with Ron Bur­nett when he writes about Anthony’s Tale in The Trans­for­ma­tion of Cul­ture.

“.…what Anthony is doing is build­ing and cre­at­ing a new lan­guage that com­bines many of the fea­tures of con­ven­tional lan­guages but is more of a hybrid of many dif­fer­ent modes of expres­sion. Just as we don“t really talk about lan­guage as a phe­nom­e­non, (because it is inher­ent to every­thing that we do) we can“t deal with this explo­sion of new lan­guages as if they are sim­ply a phase or a cul­tural anomaly.”

An inter­est­ing jux­ta­po­si­tion, how­ever, can be seen in Simon Jenk­ins’ piece in today’s Guardian on the longevity and con­tin­ued strength of the book: How we love them.…..

“.….we should never lose touch with the cen­tral­ity of the book. Prospero’s “magic” remains his library, “a duke­dom large enough”. Books are the one sure record of his­tory, as capa­ble of gen­er­at­ing wars as of inspir­ing peace. They set up reli­gions and they knock them down.

Long after emails have been wiped, tapes have decayed, CDs have rusted and com­put­ers have crashed, dusty books will remain as silent wit­nesses on the shelf. Power lies in their sim­plic­ity and inde­struc­tibil­ity. They are a habit we will never kick. We love them because we know they are for ever.”

There’s no rea­son to think, of course, that they can­not all be right!