The Power of the Story.

When did we begin to forget? African Oral traditions are being weakened by the pervasive nature of print and visual media.

And yet the dominant organ of sensory and social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear – “hearing is believing.” The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye. man was given an eye for an ear.

Western history was shaped for some three thousand years by the introduction of the phonetic alphabet, a medium that depends solely on the eye for comprehension.

The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms – particularly in terms of a space and time that are uniform.

The fragmenting of activities, our habit of thinking in bits and parts – “specialism” - reflected the step by step linear departmentalizing process inherent in the technology of the alphabet.

“The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves….You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing. “

-          Socrates, “Phaedrus”

Bibliography: The Medium is the Messagae. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore

Photo Credit:A girl engages in a conversation with a young woman.