Blog Post 1: Literal and Oral cultures

             It is not natural for us to think of an oral culture opposed to a literal, as ours. I don’t think we are capable of understanding all the changes, advantages and disadvantages, of how our life could be if we would live in an oral culture. Reading about oral cultures was very informative for me and I decided to make a list on life changes we would have. The first and most important conclusion I took is that I, personally, can see more advantages to literal cultures than disadvantages. But if there are still oral cultures, then it has advantages as well.

The biggest positive of literal cultures is the ability of saving information, in its truth version, for a very long time. In an oral culture we are not able to save information because talking makes us change the versions depending on the perspective of the person telling the story. Although the written versions also depend on who write them, they will remain the same along the time, and that is a big advantage to bring continuously the truth and history of humanity to our lives. We were also able to find another method of communication through writing, and we are using it a lot in everything we do. Emails, text messages, letters, and all the other methods that use or not digital devices, are communicative methods that we need specially for long distance communication, where we are not able to talk face to face. I personally really use the fact of written conversations, because I go back and see what a person has told me, that can be important and useful further in time. These are just some of the advantages, because we can’t even name all of them, having in mind that our entire world would change without literacy. Companies would not have documents and files, we would not have documentations, school would not require notes, written exams, boards, and so on. Technology would not exist, movies would hardly exist, book obviously would not be in this world as well, and without books, our knowledge would be very affected.   

            I personally don’t see a lot of negatives of living in a literal culture, expect of the way it diminishes the face to face communication, which is not a direct effect, but it is, in my opinion, a consequence of technology, that has come because of literacy. So we can blame literacy for changing our communications, but it is so much less than the positive effects, that our society rather stay in the literal side than go back to an oral culture.