Meditating in the middle of traffic

The main ingredient I gathered from these two articles is that writing has evolved and in order to account for its evolution, it simultaneously needs to be explained. Much like a new genre or idea it  has its disciples who push the thought forward and they also reflect on its evolution to further evaluate its uniqueness and divergency. In the first essay, From Pencils to Pixels, the author first stresses the idea that writing was a new  technology at a point in time. In order for it to be accepted it had to approximate the spoken language. At the time, in Greece, the leading discourse was on the values of rhetoric and the philosophy to describe the universe through reason. There was also the arts and tragedies that were written down, as well as law documents and court proceedings (or so I'd assume). Writing mimicked these forms of speech and genres or divisions were created to account for the individual needs.

What this set up  was a divide between reason and emotion. If we follow the strains of each, we find rhetoric as the original root, but to a common observer now, they would seem mutually exclusive. Plato argued against writing, saying that only a wise, practiced rhetorician, writing on truth, could begin to make a statement in writing. Even a writing like this is suspect, because the speaker does not know the audience and cannot formulate his argument to bear the individual's person. Also the writing has no sense of kairos and can be observed in any state or time outside the rhetor's control. What Plato seemed to argue is that there is no universal truth and different truths corroborate to different souls and a rhetor must formulate his argument accordingly. What this might mean for the formation of writing is the necessity for an outside audience when writing. A rhetor might target a specific audience for his writing that would understand previous connections and functions that other rhetors have established, building up a lineage and inter-connectivity between the writings. If we look to today though we see this notion of interconnection has morphed into something that Plato would probably shake his head at (in awe or horror I'm not sure). The notion of audience has disappeared. We usually cannot (and don't want to) control the audience that reads what we write online. They can come from all walks of life, age group, ethnicity differences, political opinions...whatever.  To account for this there is an increasing need for validity as well as an evolution towards the merging of reason and emotion, more closely mimicking true speech and rhetoric than anything we have seen in history so far. With free reign for people to comment and post articles on some sites, we see the revolution of an argument, and begin to consider all sides of a debate, instead of just one. Specific audiences are not pandered to, and in accordance, the text and wording has to change to account for this. There is such thing as computerspeak, in which people write in a shorthand English to maximize how much they can say. When I first reflected on this trend, with such outlets like Twitter, Blogs, YouTube, and Facebook, it seemed that there was a serious devaluation of language and reason, but now I wonder if I am just stuck in the past. 

I still value the individual debate between one person. I get lost in large groups and somehow feel left behind. The concept of multitasking seems like a scar against meditation and reason. 

Yet, the language is changing with or without me and young people (and old) are able to formulate arguments from a better place, seeing all sides of the story, rather than my perspective, in accordance with an old, outdated rhetoric practice that slowly accumulates information, acting only in a specific lens, framing things into it, and throwing them out if the vernacular does not quite fit.  I think universal truth might forever escape me.. 

The second topic I found interesting in From Pencils to Pixels is the notion that in order for a writing to be valid it has to have a record of existence. This was pushed with the history of Samuel Morse refusing Bell's patent to a telephone because he was convinced that no one would want a telephone due to the fact that it could not be recorded. With ancient texts and even newer Renaissance pieces such as Shakespeare's works, there is also the question of validity. This is important to the reader, because to understand certain pieces we sometimes need to compare them with previous works done by the author, or know if the author was an expert or not, or just Joe Schmo, writing in his attic. We need to know if we can trust the author and whether or not we trust the ethos they have built.

In regards to today and the internet, Baron states that we are, "faced with the interesting task of reinventing appropriate ways to validate cybertext" (23). He goes on to state that it is hard nowadays to determine who is and who isn't an expert because of the variety of opinions and ideas that we can find if we step into a chatroom or newsgroup.