Donald Trump, the First President of Our Post-Literate Age

[applegrove]

Donald Trump, the First President of Our Post-Literate Age

By Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-11-29/donald-trump-the-first-president-of-our-post-literate-age

"SNIP...........


The easiest way to grasp the difference between the written world and the oral world is that in the latter, there’s no way to look up anything. Before the invention of writing, knowledge existed in the present tense between two or more people; when information was forgotten, it disappeared forever. That state of affairs created a special need for ideas that were easily memorized and repeatable (so, in a way, they could go viral). The immediacy of the oral world did not favor complicated, abstract ideas that need to be thought through. Instead, it elevated individuals who passed along memorable stories, wisdom and good news.

And here we begin to see how the age of social media resembles the pre-literate, oral world. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other platforms are fostering an emerging linguistic economy that places a high premium on ideas that are pithy, clear, memorable and repeatable (that is to say, viral). Complicated, nuanced thoughts that require context don’t play very well on most social platforms, but a resonant hashtag can have extraordinary influence. Evan Spiegel, the chief executive officer of Snap Inc., grasped the new oral dynamics of social media when he told the Wall Street Journal: “People wonder why their daughter is taking 10,000 photos a day. What they don’t realize is that she isn’t preserving images. She’s talking.”

In “Orality and Literacy,” Ong laid out several key differences between the oral and literate worlds, and through these, you can see why someone like Donald Trump would thrive in this new oral context. Here are a few examples:

In the oral world, thoughts and expressions were, in Ong’s words, “aggregative, not analytic,” -- which is to say that language was formulaic. Ong, who studied ancient oral epics like “The Odyssey” as well as pre-literate traditions that survived into the modern age, wrote that old masters of the oral tradition preferred to speak of “not the soldier, but the brave soldier; not the princess, but the beautiful princess; not the oak, but the sturdy oak.” That sounds familiar, right? Thus with Trump, it was never “Ted Cruz,” “Marco Rubio,” or “Hillary Clinton”; it was “Lyin’ Ted,” “Little Marco” and “Crooked Hillary.” These endlessly-repeated epithets packed extra information into small, instantly-memorable packets.


............SNIP"

[C_U_L8R]

1. He truly is our Presidunce

Good god, Trump is so full of crap. An All-American Dumbass.

(PS I think he recycled his phone call with
the Pakistani PM for this superlative-stuffed speech)

[dhol82]

3. How about out Pestilence?

[dhol82]

2. I would call it the post-truth age.

[megametta]

4. very insightful

inspired me to go and "read" the whole article

[kimbutgar]

5. The one thing I noticed going into people's home who are leaning conservative are lack of books

My ex hubby was from a conservative family and inever sawbooks in his home. I grew up with books spilling out of all our rooms. I have an upstairs and downstairs library in my home. My current husband's family are vicarious readers except fir one sister who is dyslexic and all her chi,Daren are orange hitler supporters and struggling. Except for one daughter who met a guy with money who after living with him for ten years still won't marry her.