Baron Part 2: Technologies that Surpass Culture

     The second half of Baron's "A Better Pencil" brought up a theme that seems very important in today's society. That sounds kind of lofty, "in today's society, this problem permeates our lives..." but when I stop to think about my own progress with technology, it is at times difficult to separate myself from the problem – let alone the awareness that it exists as a new problem, foreign to my parents generation. Sometimes technologies cause issues in aspects of life that were unrelated to the original aspect addressed by its design.

     For example, E-Mail was designed to afford us many new abilities that snail mail could not: instant delivery, irrelevance of geographic location, affordability to acquire and send. Schools, businesses, friends all use email to communicate with an audience that can now be larger and farther away. However, this affordance creates the unique problems of spam messages that make our important messages difficult to find, suspicion about the identity of senders, and the subtraction of important cues that we can normally perceive in person (such as body language, tone, volume). As a society, we are coping with these etiquette problems together.

     In the same vein, when is it socially acceptable to text in public? What kind of messages are we sending to the people around us when we walk and text, text while we stand in line for food, text under our desks in class? Among the people in my age group, for the most part, it has become acceptable to text and talk at the same time (depending on the conversation subject matter, frequency of text interruptions, etc.). I assume these rules of etiquette will transform continually as our technology becomes an increasingly large part of our daily lives. Not to sound lofty or anything.

Baron (1) A Better Pencil

     Dennis Baron's "A Better Pencil" seems to be an analysis of society's reception of literate technology. In chapter 1, he outlines the now mythic story of Plato's distaste for written language. He believed that writing would have negative effects on memory; while he is probably right, there have obviously been huge advancements since the emergence of writing. On page 4, Baron defends Plato's stance by explaining that real knowledge is learned face-to-face, and without that – like when we have to learn something by reading – we only "display an appearance of wisdom." I have recently observed this difference in my own learning style, as the things I learn from interviewing individuals always sticks with me longer and more powerfully than a similar story read in text.
     Written language is only the first of many innovations to receive skepticism relating to the development of our literate society. So far, through chapters 1, 3, and 5, it seems that the only invention to duck suspicion is the pencil (hence the title, I assume. If the pencil was the least uncontested literate advance in technology, then the rest of the book describes the "anti" response to each new advancement). The telegraph, the telephone, the typewriter – all of these inventions were at first ill-received by members of society. Our culture has obviously accepted and adapted to these technologies, and it has practically become part of our evolution. It becomes more clear after reading Baron's chapters that these pieces that now seem so flawlessly integrated into our lives were, at one point, a very strange adjustment for older generations.
     The concepts surrounding trust seem to have changed the most: "I want to look him in the eye" versus "I want to see that in writing." Baron uses the example of the telephone to demonstrate this. Apparently, skeptics of the telephone as a successor of the telegraph doubted whether people would want to share information over a line when there was no written transcript of the conversation. Culture has accepted and welcomed the telephone, but initially, there had to be a shift in the tradition surrounding the exchange of dialogue.

Achebe (2) Dragging an oral culture forward (painfully) to literacy

     The oral culture in Achebe's story sees a dramatic change in its culture in a very short amount of time. From what we've discussed in class, it feels safe to say that change to an oral culture usually happens slowly over a generation or two, not within a single generation. When the white missionaries set up camp in Okonkwo's village, they brought with them many elements of their literate society.

• Religion and the Bible
• Government
• Prison systems
• Schools and books
• Technology: guns, bicycles

     The effect on the village is painful. The tribe is pulled apart with the missionaries' new theologies. The outcast and rejected find the white men welcoming, so they give up their allegiance to the tribe. On page 176 of "Things Fall Apart," one character says "[the missionaries] put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart."The change Okonkwo's tribe underwent severely disintegrated relationships between members, especially between Okonkwo and his son.

     The second half of "Things Fall Apart"shows the effect of a significant change in the tribe. Their belief system, their families, and their concept of governance is subjected to the "knife" of the missionaries' literate society, which ultimately rips them apart. It is not proof that one society (oral or literate) is superior, or that one is good or bad. It just shows the extreme differences between them, and how incompatible they can be. The incompatibility may be a testament to the fact that it took a very long time for oral cultures to become literate, because the sudden juxtaposition of the two has a negative and painful outcome.

     In my life, it seems that things are changing so fast I can hardly keep up with what's gong on – at my university, in Washington, in politics, in technology, etc etc etc. I feel like I have no escape from advertisements in every corner of my life, a sorry sacrifice for the allowances of technology. It accustoms me to a bombardment of new ideas, even if they do not have a significant effect on my life (no I do not want to change my hair color or join your church or sign your petition or watch a video about dancing gerbils!).

Achebe (1) Time in Oral vs. Literate Culture

     “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe gives light to the practices and culture of an oral society, in a form true to its theme. Achebe paints a picture of what an oral culture actually looks like in terms of its relationships, the tribe’s hierarchy, and their traditions – and he does this in the form of a narrative. It seems appropriate because one of the most defining differences in the way oral (vs. literate) cultures communicate has to do with the structure of information exchange. Memory is much more important to an oral culture, since it is the only tool a person has to transfer an idea. Stories are easier to remember than bits of data, as details are easier to recall when there are contextual cues like those in a plot. In our literate society, things are much more quantified, especially with the concept of time.

     We see this in "Things Fall Apart" with Okonkwo and his tribe. The book serves me as a student in this course in a way that textbooks or academic writing simply could not. Achebe could have taught me by giving dates to an event in the context of a timeline, and explained the reactions of the tribesmen with figures. The fact that he tells the story in narrative form in itself helps me understand the oral culture just a bit more. Or perhaps just in a different way – as a story – and this has stuck with me more than a report or an analysis would.

     One stark difference between Okonkwo's tribe and the society I live in surrounds the concept of time. In his world, time functions more as a measure of other factors, like weather in the seasons or the rise of the sun and the moon. They do not look at a clock or a calendar to determine when to plant their seeds or return to the market place. They place emphasis on completely different cues that originate in the actual world, instead of running on a man-made measure of the rate at which events occur (time).

     Compared to literate cultures like ours, this method seems much more conducive to peace with the natural flow of time. Here and today, I work on a schedule that allows at most a fifteen minute margin of error (without social consequences). I check my phones to prepare for the day's weather rather than look out the window or go outside. I anticipate the end of a week not because it signals any kind of renewal, but because I get a break from the busyness of the workweek. For me, most things are quantified – nailed down to a word count, an hour's deadline, or a grade. Those are the end results, they dictate how I go about my work, and they are traits of a literate society.

     Okonkwo's oral world provides a sharp contrast. He and the people in his tribe spend time talking with words rather than emailing text, and it gives them a stronger feeling of attachment to the people and things in their lives. For another thing, the Nigerian tribe's circle encompasses a space with about a ten-mile radius. When they can focus on just their circle – rather than the 0s and 1s that tell us about things happening all over the world – we see a distinction in the attitude the respective cultures have related to we spend our time.