Computer Culture

Computer Culture

I registered for this capstone course simply because its description in the English Department course guide intrigued me. I never imagined that the central issues of the course would intersect so often and so dynamically with the postmodern ideas of truth and representation in which I was already immersed.

I first articulated (for myself) the differences between oral and literate culture in a post to our class listserv on November 15, 2001. The major difference between oral and literate cultures is the primacy of the word itself. In oral culture, the words are everything; they are performance, they are meaning, and they are central to all understanding and memory. In literate culture, the words have been once removed by the representation of written language; they are now letters on a page. The sounds and actions are lost and the interpretation of language becomes more private and individual. Instead of being experienced, as in oral culture, words are simply absorbed in literate culture.

These ideas are further illustrated by referring to Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. An obvious focal point of the book, and the idea that my first summary for this class explored, is the notion that the title implies: we live by certain dominant metaphors. This is a function of oral culture despite the fact that we live in a predominantly literate culture. After certain metaphors become commonplace to speak in and with, they begin to transcend speech; they enter thought processes and allow people to not only speak, but also think, in the dominant metaphorical concepts of the culture.

The concept love, for example, is structured mostly in metaphorical terms: love is a journey, love is a patient, love is a physical force, love is madness, love is war, etc. The concept of love has a core that is minimally structured by the subcategorization love is an emotion and by links to other emotions, e.g., liking. This is typical of emotional concepts, which are not clearly delineated in our experience in any direct fashion and therefore must be comprehended primarily indirectly, via metaphor. (85)

This excerpt from Metaphors We Live By aptly supports the idea that people think in terms of metaphor, and thereby experience metaphor in the structures of oral culture as much as (if not more than) literate culture.