Week 8:

FOR THE PEOPLE READING THIS>>>IT STARTED OUT STRUCTURED>>>BUT TURNED INTO A WHOLE BUNCH OF TANGENTS…SORRY, BUT ENJOY!

Early Modern Print Culture by Harold Love:

Harold love starts his argument about print culture by describing the “primitive definition” of print culture. He says “at an elementary level, ‘print culture’ is am umbrella term for an indiscriminate body of subject matter linked in one way or another with the printed word and image” (74)

He states that the more specialized way print is described is:

1)      A ‘noetic world’ or consciousness constructed through print

2)      The industrial relationships of the book production and description

3)      A body of practices arising from the social relationships of reading and information management

4)      A specialized field of study within a wider discipline of Communication

 One of Love’s first arguments revolves around the introduction of Print to Oral “culture” (he has this weird problem with the idea that there is “oral” culture / “print” culture because it was an oral period and a print period) In Love’s first argument he mentions Ong (a leading theorist in the changing consciousness since the Gutenberg parenthesis) Love says that Ong sees development as “noetic”, and altered perceptions of language encouraged by the new medium, he says that “new kinds of cognitive experiences arose from the encounter with the printed page” (78). Love argues that while the study of cultural consciousness is legitimate and important…it is only persued at a high level of generality, and one would have to find specific ways to talk about a range of of cognitive capasities made possible by the printed word (79).

Love briefly discusses Eisenstein’s discussion saying that the speed and volume of information allows knowledge to be put to use in more efficiency.

I believe that the first part of his argument can be seen through a combination of other theorists. The blend of Ong’s consciousness argument, and Eisenstien’s argument on increasing technology in the Early Modern period allows Love to say, “oral culture was far more deeply interpenetrated by writing than is generally recognized, but in doing this, also shows how firmly the early modern cultures...remained grounded in spoken rather than the inscribed or the printed word” (76).

I really like the way that Love summarizes the fact that the changing consciousness and technology did permeate the culture, but the one didn’t erase the other, as I discussed earlier, books were expensive entities. It was cheaper to go to six showings of the globe theater than purchase a book. This allows the culture to remain “grounded in the spoken” word over the printed word… because it was economically easier.

On the other hand, Love uses the Watergate tapes in the NIxion trials as an example of how orality over literacy still is used today, however the Watergate tapes…are a developing technology to make the spoken word repeatable using sounds versus symbols on the page. (But that’s a little off topic.)

Another side note that I love that Love mentions is the fallacy that a printed culture refers to a more intellectual culture (and more contemporarily…the digital culture—is it more intellectual?)  anyone that was immersed in the print culture would have to be immersed in the oral culture as well, because you cannot be immersed with a culture of symbols of phonemic meaning without the sounds and meanings to attach to them, can you? Love doesn’t go into depth about this technological advance, but I wonder if there is more that I will find as I continue.