One of the most profound effects technology has had on society is to give humans the ability to communicate through time and space. Before the advent of writing (about 3500 years ago), the only way people could share ideas was face-to-face. (I'm talking words here. People have used art to convey meaning for much longer than that.) And don't get me wrong. As a folklorist, I've devoted my scholarly study to communication in small groups, communication that often takes place face-to-face. But the ability of the printed word to make connections between people who have never, or could never, meet, dazzles me.
Think about it. I can experience the very words of Plato, Shakespeare and Robert Frost, even though all three died before I was born. I will grant you that sitting at the feet of one of these men and listening to his words would be even more thrilling, but that is currently impossible. (I do have a standing offer in all of my classes. Anyone who invents a working time machine gets an A.) The closest we can come to interacting with great thinkers is by reading their words. And by reading, their ideas are recreated in our own minds. It's a type of telepathic time travel!
Of course, you might say that not all ideas are worth preserving, that the persistence of Mien Kampf allows Hitler's lies about the Jews to influence neo-Nazis long after he has died. And you are right. But I subscribe to John Stuart Mill's belief, articulated in his 1859 book, On Liberty, that "the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error." We need to confront bad ideas, even stupid or evil ones, and think critically about them in order to reject them.
But even more than allowing us to commune with great minds or condemn evil ideas, I celebrate print's ability to show us that people are people, no matter the time or place. I'm pretty sure I could have had a great time traveling and gossiping all over fifteenth-century Europe with Margery Kempe. Her autobiography, The Book of Margery Kempe, reveals a bossy and strong-willed woman who bucked her society's rules to ensure that her ideas and experiences were saved for the benefit of posterity. My kind of woman! Anne Frank's diary is not only a testimony to the evils of anti-Semitism, it is the voice of a bright and perceptive teenager who, like all teenagers, just wanted to be heard. Reading the letters sent home by soldiers of the Civil War allows us to understand what it was like to stand knee-deep in the mud and blood of that crucial American conflict.
In a class about the effects that society and technology have on each other, don't think too narrowly about what encompasses "technology." Humans have been putting tools to use for millennia. And encoding thought into written words is one of the most powerful and transformative of these technologies.
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