Hi Charles,
I think you bring up a hard to fathom part of my thoughts I've been writing down. And I wanted to take note of that.
you write,
I'm thinking there is a lot of writing , even new alphabets in the codes
used for software like javascript, in computerization, such that
computerization may increase writing rather than cause it to diminish.
There's email , blogs et al that tend the same way.
Doyle,
Well, writing systems will persist for a while, but as far as computing is concerned the interactivity (lack of) of the written word is the key business (Google) issue. I suppose one could characterize say writing javascript as a 'language'. People do that especially the technical community took that up, but how language like is Javascript? Not very. Writing scripts really evolved from the beginning as to how easy they were to use to reproduce the speech of an individual. The alphabet, with Phoenician Semitic origins and expanded by the Greeks and Romans was far simpler than Egyptian script and Cuneiform script. Javascript and other numerical means of writing code don't perform the same sort of work as language writing scripts, in the same way photos don't perform language, or over all math doesn't perform language.
Interactivity is a sort of neutral sounding word and as such doesn't convey much. The Marxist use of the Greek concept of the Dialectic doesn't really convey 'conversation' as it might have meant to the Greeks. Still, conversation in plane language is illustrative of interactivity of language. It gets us away from the word lying inertly on the page to the concept of two speakers who share the same language, and the word goes back and forth between speakers honed by multiple uses into stable meanings. Conversation as it were emphasizes the communal aspects that exchanging words does.
When people read books the interactivity is by conversation with others not the author, but interactivity (the communal character of speech) is not picked up from the printed word on it's historically dominant storage media of paper or more ancient bases like clay. The one-to-many characterization refers to how the author doesn't talk to the reader, doesn't have a conversation. Though book tours are a popular way to take advantage commercially of what conversation adds to a book.
I link the Dialectic and Conversation convergence because it is helpful to see for a Marxist the social power underlying the politics of this sort of commercial change in global culture. Conversational culture describes the grid computing potential to render more and more information interactive. I'm not here to extol a commercial culture that capitalism creates, I'm here to comment on the communal structure the left can create with the same set of tools.
you write,
Now talk-radio strikes me as having potential for increasing people's dialectic.
Doyle,
This captures the idea that conversation or talk radio has a huge impact primarily because on air conversation conveys a commercial value that someone just narrating can't capture News readers). Something of the inertness of text like the single voice quickly lose our attention.
Talk radio is still a pseudo-conversational media. Underlying the message heard on a program is the real difficulty of actually holding a real conversation with the persons on the radio. The illusion one could call up the show host and participate grabs the guts and holds the listener powerfully when the material resonates with everyday life. Like the written text in a book the interactivity is being hinted at, but much is missing from the reality of the medium that is the actual communal work process. In essence the massive contribution of the masses is lost by one to many media.
Text based media especially demonstrate clearly the one to many character of the media.
Here is an article from the NYTimes about a conversational culture style business and it give a taste of the difference that brings to information when the commune is more involved in create information. <x-tad-bigger>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/28/travel/escapes/28virtual.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1130523033-iDhLAJdIcdkveiR0STBnJA
</x-tad-bigger><x-tad-bigger>Here is the business they are talking about: </x-tad-bigger><x-tad-bigger>http://secondlife.com/
</x-tad-bigger><x-tad-bigger>thanks,
Doyle Saylor</x-tad-bigger>
