Life without letters
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed (you can even subscribe via email!). Thanks for visiting!
Browsing through Borgmann’s ‘Holding on to reality’* and came across this:
“If we think of information as a relation… …we can hardly fail to notice that in a hypertrophically informed society like ours the SIGN looms large. If all our ledgers, accounts, files, calendars, memos, letters, scores, plans, maps, databases, and other records should suddenly disappear, so would the order and coherence of our society. We are so used to the mass and sophistication of our vehicles and containers of information that a society without them seems primitive and incomplete. We used to call such a culture illiterate. Within the twentieth century, however, we have learned to recognise that life without letters has its own coherence and dignity, and we have come to call it oral rather than illiterate.”
I would add that the visual discourse played out in both real-world body language and virtual world avatar gesture are equally representative of a life without letters, that they both have their own coherence and that they both have their own dignity.
 …..
* Borgmann, A 1999. Holding on to reality: the nature of information at the turn of the millennium. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; p. 38
