In this essay, Jack Goody and Ian Watt use a combination of historical analysis, primary fieldwork, and reference to other fieldwork to try to trace the changes that result in thinking and and social life as societies move gradually from primarily non-literate cultures to literate ones. They use the example of ancient Greece as an important cases study in this transformation from non-literate to literate.
Oral cultures mediate the past through the present. See the examples of the Tiv and the Gonja on pgs. 32-33. I wonder how much they are overlooking a tendency in literate cultures to also define the past in terms of the present. But, the point is that in written cultures you have writing that records thoughts at a particular moment in time that can be revisited and discussed in a "detached" manner.
"...writing establishes a different kind of relationship between the word and its referant, a relationship that is more general and more abstract, and less closely connected with the particularities of person, place and time, than obtains in oral communication" (44). This is a central concept and also reflects their emphasis on the importance of the medium and their often technological deterministic stance. Writing allows from criticism and the "articulation of inconsistency" (48), not possible in the oral cultures.
Two significant "consequences of literacy" in ancient Greece: the development of "logic" and of "classification." In light of Lev Manovich, I can't help thinking about "algorithm" and "database" here. So is algorithm and database something to do with New Media or drawn out of an old medium like "writing"?
While not necessarily an essential aspect of the work, there are instances where Goody and Watt use the language of traditional communication metaphors (conduit metaphor) in how they describe cultural learning. For example, they speak of cultures as being "channelled through words" (28). They rarely address culture production as at a minimum a process in which the learners have significant agency, at least not until they begin to address the potentially negative consequences of literacy and the "choices" that people have in literate cultures that they did not have in non literate cultures.
There is some tension in this work between the role of the social in the development of the new technologies of literacy, but much of the language is highly deterministic. Literacy has effects and consequences on society. This may be problematic in light of theories of STS. However, this discussion may also be useful in light of thinking about a more balance approach to considering culture production, communication, and the affordances of particular media vs. social and cultural factors.
An interesting part of the article that perhaps has been treated less significantly, is Goody and Watt's of some "negative" consequences. This begins with the premise that due to writing, the extent of human knowledge that can be discovered and understood is greater than in oral cultures. On page 57, they speak of the "unlimited proliferation..." of words and definitions. "Literate society, merely by having no system of elimination, no 'structural amnesia', prevents the individual from participating fully in the total cultural tradition to anything like the extent possible in non-literate society." Thus participation is always partial. Therefore, they can create an interesting argument about the supposed democratizing powers of literacy in modern education. There is tension between "the school and the peer group," or to use the language of Paul Willis and others, the "formal" and the "informal." In a literate culture, people have choice to participate and choice not to participate. See page 60: ".. but also because the abstractness of the syllogism and of the Aristotelian categorizations of knowledge do not correspond very directly with common experience. The abstractness of the syllogism, for example, of its very nature disregards the individual's social experiences and immediate personal context; and the compartmentalization of knowledge similarly restricts the kind of connections which the individual can establish and ratify with the natural and social world. The essential way of thinking of the specialist in literate culture is fundamentally at odds with that of daily life and common experiences; and the conflict is embodied in the long tradition of jokes about absent-minded professors." And I add: common-sense vs. book-learning. Street smarts vs. school smarts.
Participation and literacy is a theme that Goody and Watt seem to introduce here, but they don't spend too much time on. Page 63 has a notable exception when they talk more about personal selections, choices, and so forth. Here is a nice pre-cursor to the rejection of "media effects" without thinking about the agency of the of the reader/viewer/audience.
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