By: puppy

puppy — Thu, 05 May 2011 07:46:07 +0000

[...] The FASTForward Blog » Phonetic Alphabet: the Information Technology That Keeps On Giving: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary [...]

By: Phil

Phil — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:15:14 +0000

I came to this page from Google, pressed Ctrl-f and typed in the words I was interested in and pressed enter, it immediately took me to the bit I was interested in (I have since paged up and scanned more of the content).
You need to be able to filter to use the internet efficiently, I've sat and watched videos for 10 minutes and they never told me what I wanted to know but I didn't realise that until I'd watched it all, with tet you can scan much more quickly. Also, people who make videos are all starting to add their little "intros" to each video so you get an annoying 20 second interlude at the start of each video.
Even if I read the full content I read much faster than people talk and there's nothing worse than <<<>>>…

By: John Verity

John Verity — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 03:19:50 +0000

I was interested to see your reference to Ivan Illich and his consideration of the history of the alphabet. Illich actually thought of the alphabet as not merely the most important information technology in history but one of the most important technologies, or tools, of all. And he was quite concerned with how this tool, like others, shaped its users.
As you point out, Illich describes in his book The Vineyard of the Text how the written alphabet helped to usher in such structures as indices, tables of contents, and even the isolated word itself. Speech tends to be a continuous stream of sound, and without a method for fixing thoughts and speech to paper, it is quite difficult to consider one word in comparison to another. Anyone interested in this subject will do well to look at Orality & Literacy, by Walter J. Ong – a book that Illich often recommended to his listeners.
While the Vineyard book certainly focuses on a small period in the history of reading, as reading transformed from an oral practice to a silent, more contemplative practice, the text actually leaving the page to be independent of its oral interpretation, Illich's argument is more expansive. He is mainly interested in how our tools shape our conception of the word and of our selves.
Reading as we have come to know and practice it was shaped by the use of the phonetic alphabet. Moreover, this same alphabet and the textual structures and the literacy it helped make possible radically changed human consciousness. They reshaped the mental landscape, as Illich calls it, and made possible the modern individual. And, Illich argues, it reshape the landscape even for the vast majority of people who could not, themselves, actually read. Even those without reading skills thought of "turning a page" in their lives, for example, or prepared for judgement at Heaven's door by a guy with a big book in front of him. And so forth. In short, the traditional book became a root metaphor of the Western self, having effects far beyond its immediate users, as we would say. And Illich sees this reshaping of consciousness and self well evident well before the arrival of Gutenberg and his printing press.
Illich goes further, however. He shows that just as modern reading and the bookish self came into being at a certain moment in history, shaped by certain technologies such as the alphabet, they are now giving way – giving way to the screen, which is his shorthand for today's array of electronic information technologies. And so, he argues, as traditional reading disappears, so will the modern self, which is of great concern to him.
Indeed, he perceives a "chasm" existing between oral culture and literate, bookish culture, with neither side able to truly grasp how the other thinks and conceives of the world. And now, he sees opening up a similarly unbridgeable chasm between literate culture, in which the book dominated, and whatever it is that the Web and the computer and scree will bring into being. And what worries him is that on the far side of this chasm, man (and woman) will, once again, be reshaped. How, exactly, is unknowable.

By: Jon Husband

Jon Husband — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 07:51:19 +0000

I also agree .. text won't be disappearing any time soon

Comments on: Phonetic Alphabet: the Information Technology That Keeps On Giving

By: puppy

By: Phil

By: John Verity

By: Jon Husband