The change from oral culture to written culture not only changed the way people learned information, it started a revolution and completely changed a person’s relationship to text. The world went from a place where everything anyone knew came from something someone said to them to a place where information could be looked up and primary sources were more than just the person who originally spoke a thought out loud. Not only did the world become a bigger place, the way people thought completely changed.
Today writing and literacy is considered an essential skill for everyone to have. However, when writing first began it was not looked at as such a positive thing. Plato, one of the most famous rhetoricians from history, famously thought that writing was the end of learning. He thought no one would remember anything anymore and thought that it was essential for people to be able to communicate with the person making the argument so the person making the argument would have a chance to defend themselves. Writing had a near immediate effect on the church as soon as people could read and interpret the bible themselves and also effected rhetoric with rhetoricians like Ramus learning the history of rhetoric and interpreting it for themselves (Ramus). In a way, writing was the beginning of individual thought and learning. While people had original thoughts before, learning was discussed with others and not individual like it can be today. Many famous artists and musicians are self-taught, something they wouldn’t have been able to do as easily without writing.
One of the most important changes that happened when written culture began was for thoughts to last longer than the life of the person who verbalized them. While information had been orally passed down in oral culture, a game of telephone clearly demonstrates that it is hard for information not to change over time when only spoken. Spoken learning gives authority to the speaker, and in the case of the church many people felt that power had been abused. According to an article by Robert K. McIver and Ray C. Roennfeldt, “time brings changes in ideas and attitudes to all social organizations, including religious organizations. Authoritative texts, such as are found within many religions, do not change with time. Hence, social change brings with it the need to develop suitable means to determine what changes are consistent with the principles laid down in the authentic documents of the religion, and what changes are incompatible with them.” However, there is only so far one can get by themselves. In the same article the authors mention that “closer examination has revealed that there are other important considerations that influence how [authoritative texts like the bible are] understood. Church leaders have the ability to shape the changes that take place within their denominations, although this ability is limited by what membership of that denomination is prepared to find acceptable.” In the case of the church, while many people felt misled and outraged when able to interpret the bible for themselves, oral culture is clearly still a major factor when it comes to religion suggesting that not everyone is eager to learn for themselves or feel the need for a second opinion from a trustworthy source.
An article from the Journal of Popular Culture compares news given in the form of a revue versus a newspaper relating it to the change from oral to written culture in history. Vangsnes says “the classical rhetor was neither an actor nor a petit-style journalist…[but] could be a teacher or a politician, a man who mastered the art of speaking…the rhetorical tradition has been criticized for persuading instead of arguing. What is important is not what you say, but how you say it.” I think it’s important to realize that charisma was a key characteristic to rhetoric in oral culture. Bad writing definitely exists, but there are few truly terrible writers while there are many people that do not excel at public speaking.
Another important difference between oral and written culture is the lifetime of a text. Vangsnes believes that oral communication is temporary, “as an event the revue is a unique action and has a fleeting existence.” People will only remember all of something they heard for so long. While they retain the most important parts, the whole is lost. “A text, on the other hand, is fixed meaning. The text can be interpreted independent of time and is a more permanent character,” (Vangsnes). This goes back to the issue of the church and people interpreting the bible independently without hearing of it only through a priest. The article goes on to discuss how an author is separate from the text and that texts live on for no fixed period of time. Vangsnes claims that “the author’s intention is almost irrelevant,” which I disagree with. Text can be interpreted in several different ways, but I feel like as a culture we want to respect the author’s intentions. Books are in many ways like art in the sense that the author or artist may have completely different meaning for a piece than the reader or viewer, but most non-fiction works are read with context about history if nothing else. I think the author’s intention is actually very important, but it is true that in written culture it is harder for an author to express their intent or even admit if they changed their mind on a topic many years later, the evidence still exists in writing.
The most important point that Vangnes’s article makes is that in a revue the audience reacts to the things being said but “the writer does not have this kind of dialogue with the reader. The readers of the newspaper must give their replies indirectly,” which relates back to Plato’s point about the importance of being able to react with the audience when creating a text. The invention of writing helped give people a personal relationship to text in the sense that a person could now read and interpret a text completely by themselves, but there is also importance to the relationship the author of a text had with the listener in oral culture. I know that I have wanted to ask an author or artist what their piece means and if I’m interpreting it correctly. I don’t think that this is the case with every piece of text, but it’s true in some cases that I don’t always want to interpret material for myself.
We are in the middle of another transformation to multimedia and the internet. This opens the world up to even more information, but has made it easier than ever to communicate with the author of an online text. We are now in a world where the relationship between people and a text has crossed the boundary. Now, you can comment on a blog or news article and receive feedback from the author while first being able to independently interpret it. The internet has blurred the line between oral and written culture and has expanded the advantages of writing while still leaving some of the accessibility written culture gave a reader.
The change from oral to written culture allowed people to have a relationship to multitudes of texts rather than only the ones they could observe and learn about. Written culture made the world much wider and allowed new ideas and information to spread much more quickly. However, the relationship of the author and the reader became nearly nonexistent. Rhetoric became accessible to everyone, for everyone to learn, but in the process lost a lot of the personal connection ancient rhetoricians had with their students and audience. Luckily the growth of multimedia has allowed this to change and allows authors and celebrities to be just a comment or tweet away. We are in the middle of a new revolution where more voices than ever are being heard and listened to.
Works Cited
MCIVER, ROBERT K., and RAY C. W. ROENNFELDT. "Text and Interpretation: Christian Understandings of Authoritative Texts in the Light of Social Change." Islam & Christian-Muslim Relations 20.3 (2009): 257-276. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 23 Oct. 2010.
Plato, "Phaedrus." The Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Patricia Bizzell. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. Print.
Ramus, Peter. "Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintilian." The Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Patricia Bizzell. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 2001. Print.
Vangsnes, Erik. "Revues and Newspapers: On Critics and Rhetoric in Local Media." Journal of Popular Culture 26.4 (1993): 101-114. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 23 Oct. 2010.
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