User:Max/rwm/theinformationunderstandingmedia

James Gleick: The Information

Chapter 2: The Persistence of the World

Walter J. Ong: speech is not a technology / writing is. Speech is more a truer sense of our internal feelings. Writing organizes thought in a technological (non-natural) way. Quotes Platon's Socrates: the invention of writing will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it because they will not practice their memory. -> writing = appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom. -> writing does allow the dead to speak to the living and the living to the unborn. -> writing is a "twisting journey from things to words, from words to categories, from categories to metaphor and logic."

Chapter 3: Wordbooks

"like the printing press, the telegraph and the telephone before it, the internet is transforming the language simply by transmitting information differently. What makes cyberspace different from all previous information technologies is its intermixing of scales from the largest to the smallest without prejudice, broadcasting to the millions, narrowcasting to groups, instant messaging to one"