Oral and literate (R)evolutions

• Main Author: Hutton, Scot
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/4192

This thesis is an investigation into some of the effects upon 1) ancient Greece as it shifted from a preliterate to a literate society; and upon 2) North America as it shifts from a primarily literate culture to one which relies upon electronic media (a mixture of literacy and prality which incorporates both but in the final analysis is neither). Because of the breadth of the topic I have created three chapters which are meant to stand on their own (each with its own bibliography). Even though this is a progressive (nonlinear) investigation which spends little time attempting to draw conclusions, the theme of (r)evolutions in communications unite the tangents of inquiry which comprise this project. The twentieth century has produced epistemological, sociocultural, and, with the help of the evolution of electronic media, communications revolutions at least as jarring as those of fifth and sixth century B C E Greece. It is between these two (r)evolutionary periods that I draw parallels. The fundamental ideas behind the communication (r)evolution in ancient Greece, the shift from a preliterate to a literate society, is known to many. But what is of known of the epistemological, sociocultural, and cognitive changes coinciding with these shifts? It is these past transformations I hope illuminate so that we might better understand through comparison, the implications of the complex revolutions in communication we are in the midst of today. === Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies === Graduate