A Better Pencil - New Technologies Everyday

            After the reading assigned for the class, there were many quotes and ideas that came to my mind. Right from the start I found very interesting the way the writer talked about technologies and the acceptance of those. Our generation is used to all of these new technologies developed in gadgets and devices, but how did people looked at them when they were first created? As it’s mentioned in the book, they were accepted the same way that the wheel was first accepted. Today, we would guarantee the progress of the wheel and how that helped our culture to develop. But in fact, many people wouldn’t had seen it as an evolution. Human being, as all other animals, like what is safe, and what they know how it works. Although we all support the progress and evolution of technologies, many of us are critics when a new product or idea is brought to life. I wanted to try to understand how would people feel, and look at something new today, compared to how they looked before. Are our minds still as closed to progress as they were before? In my opinion they are not. And the proof is that every time there is something newer or better than our we want to have it. Of course there are still a lot of people that don’t agree with this, and think that digital technologies are destroying literacy. They have their own evidences that we can’t prove wrong, but we fight those comments with the positive outcomes that we had with those digital technologies.

            One of the more interesting quotes, that made me consider all the factors and results from the technological progresses we made, talks about the changes that occur in literacy. “Whether we embrace them or fear them, the technologies that we use to compose, disseminate, and archive our words … not only make reading and writing possible, they also have affected our reading and writing practices. The technologies of our literacy … help to determine what we write and what we can’t write. But the technology works two ways: it channels what we do, but it also changes to meet the needs of writers and readers, who play a role in modifying the direction that writing technology takes.” The first part of this quotes is very important, and we have to realize that the use of computers allowed us to become writers, because we get much more practice than before. This quote also shows the negative part which is directing the flow of what we write depending on the technology we are using.

In my opinion changes are going to happen every day, and we can’t simply ignore them or stop them from happening. The best solution is to use all the positive outcomes while trying to not get negatively affected.

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

“Things Fall Apart,” by Chinua Achebe is very different from other books. First of all, the structure in witch it’s tragedy is develop is very close to real life, what in my personal opinion it makes it much more interesting. This book is about a men named Okonkwo, and it tells two separate stories about him. But more than telling a story about an individual, this book is about his tribe, and all the traditions, values, and the culture itself. Okonkwo is from a tribe in Nigeria, and that tribe has an oral culture. The book is published in 1958 so we have to understand the time this story took place and the power, or the lack of it, this tribe had. I didn’t know much more than this about Nigeria, so after reading the first chapter I had some good background about the main character, Okonkwo, that gave me some information about how the culture of the tribe is. This chapter talks about his family, the environment he lived in, and Okonkwo himself.

The second story of this book is about missionaries that came to Nigeria, to their “territories” and changed everything in those people’s life. They built churches, schools to read and write, and the culture of the tribe changes drastically. The first thing that comes to my mind when reading about the tribe and the oral culture is the way language is preserved. In tribes like this, there are no books you can read if you want to find out about the past of the tribe. You need to go to the elders of the group, because they are the only ones having the knowledge.

            

            The question is coming to my mind is why do cultures like this wants to stay oral cultures instead of becoming literal cultures and preserve all the tribe’s history much easier? Other question I have is how would a culture and the history of a country, tribe, or nation change when it goes from an oral culture to a literal culture? There are still tribes about the world that are oral and refuse to progress in their communication. For me, this is the same thing as technologies. There are people that refuse to use smartphones, computers, and other digital technologies because they believe that would only ruin their culture and change their lives is a bad way. The question we all have to consider is how big of an improvement is to use technologies (writing included), and how has the culture changed since we started using those.

Ong - Orality and Literacy Reading (Part 2)

             Even though literacy is not a natural thing for us, most of the cultures had accepted it as characteristic of humans and a normal thing for each one of us. Studying about other cultures can open our minds and make us understand that literacy haven’t reached the entire humanity yet. There are still some cultures that are primary oral and because of that all their cultural history, as well as their lives are drastically different. Imagining a culture without literacy is not as easy. I don’t think people that are able to read and write realize that. Not having literacy means that communication is affected negatively, and their cultural stories are not able to stay the same along the generation.

            “Most, if not all, oral cultures generate quite substantial narratives or series of narratives, such as the stories of the Trojan wars among the ancient Greeks, the coyote stories among various Native American populations, the Anansi (spider) stories in Belize and other Caribbean cultures with some African heritage, the Sunjata stories of old Mali, the Mwindo stories among the Nyanga, and so on. Because of their size and complexity of scenes and actions, narratives of this sort are often the roomiest repositories of an oral culture’s lore.” – Page 138

            We all know a lot of those stories and we realize there are not possible, and we might question how the stories started at first place. After reading the text, and understanding the importance of literacy, I understand that each generation can add or subtract a small detail to make the story sound more heroic and more nationalistic in some cases. The power of literacy is to preserve the content of a narrative and primary oral cultures don’t have the ability to do that. Instead they create these heroic stories that can even relate to religion in some cases.

            I started thinking about this by myself and I realize this doesn’t happen only with primary oral cultures. Each one of us knows a popular saying, or a proverb, or even a ritual that is not proven anywhere, and it is not written in any book, but we still say it because it is a cultural idea. There is a lot of “bad luck” ideas that we believe in that have no logical explanation. For example, Friday the 13^th has a historical explanation of one single event that occurred on that day, and for any reason, we believe that bad things are going to happen every Friday 13^th. We have to understand that is each generation would have changed the path of each one of these stories, we wouldn’t know them the way they are. And if we would have written them down, everything would be clear. This is one of the biggest advantages of literacy and knowing that there are cultures limited at this point, we understand that it is not a natural thing.