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Biases of the Ear and Eye

Daniel Chandler

'Great Divide' Theories

In the early 1960s several influential books and papers were published on
the theme of oral versus literate cultures. These included The Savage Mind
by the French structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, a paper on
'The Consequences of Literacy' by the English anthopologist Jack Goody
and his colleague the literary historian Ian Watt, The Gutenberg Galaxy by
Marshall McLuhan, and Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock. These works
and many others since brought to prominence the theme of what came to be
called 'orality and literacy' in cultural debates. It is a stimulating but
controversial topic with considerable implications for anyone concerned
with literacy. It sheds light, for instance, on some of the influences framing
the widespread and dominant paranoid myth of the so-called decline of
literacy (see Graff 1987).

Someone once wittily remarked that the world is divided into those who
divide people into two types, and those who don't. One of those who do
asserts that people are either ear people or eye people (Tardif, cited in
Synnott 1993, p. 129). This usefully introduces both of our main themes
here: dichotomies versus continua, and the ear versus the eye. Indeed, some
theorists have argued that an increasing obsession with the visual is what
has led us to favour dividing things into tidy categories. For instance, it's
only a categorical convention that we have five senses.

Theorists involved in the comparative analysis of modes of communication

frequently assume or refer to a binary divide or dichotomy between
different kinds of society or human experience: 'primitive' vs. 'civilized',
'simple' vs. 'advanced', 'pre-logical' vs. 'logical', 'pre-rational' vs. 'rational',
'pre-analytic' vs. 'analytic', 'mythopoeic' vs. 'logico-empirical', 'traditional'
vs. 'modern', 'concrete' vs. 'scientific', 'oral' vs. 'visual', or 'pre-literate' vs.
'literate'. Such pairings are often also regarded as virtually interchangeable:
so that modernity equals advanced equals civilization equals literacy equals
rationality and so on. Lucien Levy-Bruhl created a storm of protest early in
this century by labelling as 'prelogical' the thinking of people in hunter-
gatherer societies. This was hardly surprising, because the apparent
implication that some people are intellectually inferior has alarming

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political potential.

Binary accounts have been referred to as 'Great Divide' theories. Such

theories tend to suggest radical, deep and basic differences between modes
of thinking in non-literate and literate societies. They are often associated
with attempts to develop grand theories of social organization and
development. Dualities are prominent in the commentaries of structuralist
theorists. Like any form of simplification they can be interpretatively
illuminating. However, the sharp division of historical continuity into
periods 'before' and 'after' a technological innovation such as writing
assumes the determinist notion of the primacy of 'revolutions' in
communication technology. And differences tend to be exaggerated.
Reviewing the research literature, Ruth Finnegan comments that 'it is
difficult to maintain any clear-cut and radical distinction between those
cultures which employ the written word and those that do not' (cited in
Olson 1994, xv).

One defence of a great divide theory by Jack Goody suggested that to deny
any significant distinction between non-literate and literate societies
involved adopting the widely criticized stance of cultural relativity (Goody
et al. 1968, p. 67). Goody argues that 'general' rather than radical differences
still exist between non-literate and literate cultures which are greater than
the differences one may find between various literate practices. Another
reaction to criticisms of a great divide is offered by David Olson and Angela
Hildyard. These commentators, convinced of the key role of literacy in
developing intellectual competence, declare that if there is no difference
between pre-literate and literate mentality then we could hardly justify
compulsory schooling (Olson & Hildyard 1978 cited in Street 1984, p. 19).
They would clearly prefer not to acknowledge that a primary function of
schooling is social control in the interests of ruling elites (see Graff 1987).

Harvey Graff refers to the 'tyranny of conceptual dichotomies' - such as

literate and illiterate, written and oral, print and script - in the study and
interpretation of literacy. He declares that 'None of these polar opposites
usefully describes actual circumstances; all of them, in fact, preclude
contextual understanding' (Graff 1987, p. 24). The interpretive alternatives
to Great Divide theories are sometimes called 'Continuity' theories: these
stress a 'continuum' rather than a radical discontinuity between oral and
literate modes, and an on-going dynamic interaction between various media
(Finnegan 1988, pp. 139, 175).

One apologist for a great divide theory insists that continuity theories
suggest 'that orality and literacy are essentially equivalent linguistic means

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for carrying out similar functions. Psychologically their differences are not
important... The role of literacy is more social and institutional than it is
psychological or linguistic.' On the other hand, great divide theories argue
'that orality and literacy, whilst importantly interactive... allow old functions
to be served in new ways and to bring new functions into view. In doing so,
they realign psychological processes and social organization' (Olson &
Torrance 1991, p. 7).

The crosscultural cognitive psychologists Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner

in their important book on The Psychology of Literacy (1981) have avoided
both the stance that thinking in oral and literate modes is basically the same
and also 'the Great Cognitive Divide'. They note more moderately from their
research amongst the Vai people of Liberia that literacy there appeared have
no general cognitive consequences. Their research contradicted the common
view that literacy leads inevitably to higher forms of thought. 'On no task -
logic, abstraction, memory, communication - did we find all nonliterates
performing at lower levels than all literates... We can and so claim that
literacy promotes skills among the Vai, but we cannot and do not claim that
literacy is a necessary and sufficient condition for any of the skills we
assessed' (Cole & Scribner 1981, p. 251). They also found that schooling
rather than literacy appeared to be the significant cause of some changes in
cognitive skills involved in the logical functions of language. They argued
that 'the tendency of schooled populations to generalize across a wide range
of problems occurred because schooling provides people with a great deal
of practice in treating individual learning problems as instances of general
classes of problems'. They emphasized the importance of considering the
use of literacy in different social contexts, and concluded only that
'particular practices promote particular skills'. Patricia Greenfield declared
that Scribner and Cole's study 'should rid us once and for all of the
ethnocentric and arrogant view that a single technology suffices to create in
its users a distinct, let alone superior, set of cognitive processes' (cited in
Olson 1994, 20).

Some commentaries refer to idealized types of society as if 'orality' and

'literacy' were dichotomies or polar opposites. Dichotomies and polarization
are often intended to simplify accounts of cultural diversity. So cultures
characterized as representative of 'orality' are small-scale, rural, communal,
nonindividualistic, authoritarian and conformist, whilst those characterized
as exemplars of 'literacy' are large-scale, urban-industrial, individualistic,
heterogeneous and rationalistic. Contrasting societies can be illuminating,
especially in making us aware of our own taken-for-granted cultural
assumptions. But the distinctions between literate and non-literate societies

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(or phases in our own society) are not as clear-cut as is often assumed. And
some characteristics of non-literate societies cannot simply be attributed to
non-literacy.

Those in non-literate societies do not necessarily think in fundamentally

different ways from those in literate societies, as is commonly assumed.
Differences of behaviour and modes of expression clearly exist, but
psychological differences are often exaggerated. Although one
commentator, Peter Denny, argues that 'decontextualization' seems to be a
distinctive feature of thinking in Western literate societies, he nevertheless
insists that all human beings are capable of rationality, logic, generalization,
abstraction, theorizing, intentionality, causal thinking, classification,
explanation and originality (in Olson & Torrance 1991, p. 81). All of these
qualities can be found in oral as well as literate cultures.

It is important to be aware of the similarities as well as the differences

between non-literate cultures and our own. Nor should we exaggerate the
similarities between various non-literate societies, or indeed between literate
societies, as such labels encourage us to do. The differences between
non-literate societies can be as striking as any between literate and
non-literate societies. And there can be a great variety of modes of 'orality'
and 'literacy' within a single society. Even the practices of individuals in
their use of these modes may exhibit considerable variety from situation to
situation.

There is a real danger that seeing non-literates societies as different from

ours may be associated with seeing those who live in such societies as
inferior to ourselves. The notion of 'primitive mentality' is now rejected by
most anthropologists, though it survives amongst some conservative
theorists. And the alternative danger of romanticizing 'oral' societies as
more 'natural' than those in which we live is no less a problem.

There are several books which offer excellent correctives to the wild
generalizations of some less critical writers on literacy and orality. I
recommend in particular Ruth Finnegan's Literacy and orality, Brian
Street's Literacy in Theory and Practice, Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner's
The Psychology of Literacy and Harvey Graff's The Labyrinths of Literacy.
Whilst emphasizing the primary importance of close studies of actual uses
of orality and literacy, Finnegan concludes that 'looking for recurrent
patterns and differences can still be illuminating in the study of human
societies even if one has to treat them with caution, and (as I would urge)
avoid the idea of universally applicable causal mechanisms based on
specific technologies' (Finnegan 1988, p. 168).

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Spoken word Written word

aural visual
impermanence permanence
fluid fixed
rhythmic ordered
subjective objective
inaccurate quantifying
resonant abstract
time space
present timeless
participatory detached
communal individual

Some dichotomies of the ear and eye

(Sources: McLuhan 1962, 19; Ong 1967, 34, 73, 92; Postman 1979,
35). Note that whilst speech is often presented as ‘warm’ and writing
as ‘cold’, McLuhan reversed this.

Clearly, there are fundamental technical differences between the medium of

writing and the medium of speech which constitute 'constraints' on the ways
in which they may be used, but I do not wish to adopt the stance of hard
technological determinism according to which such features would
determine the ways in which they are used.

Whatever the technical constraints of the medium, it is useful to remind

ourselves of the social context of its use. We need to consider the overall
'ecology' of processes of mediation in which our behaviour is not
technologically determined but in which we both use a medium and can be

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subtly influenced by our use of it.

Contents
Contents Page
'Great Divide' Theories
Phonocentrism
Graphocentrism
Logocentrism
References and Further Reading

Last modified: 07/10/2000 09:20:29

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