Group 1, Week of March 6th.

Ong and KittlerGroup 1: Jon Kebe, Etienne, Mohanad, Jason, Bastien, Brent

Walter Ong tackles quite an interesting topic: the "Technologizing" of the world through questioning the real interrelation between The Literate mind and the Oral past. We believe that remembering how guiding our lives as a human society quite a few centuries ago, although it still brought evolution to us, we could see the increasing technological an scientific evolutions when we actually started embracing books and literature. It is important indeed to know a language because it all evolves into power and influence (through CONTROL), and that is most likely the way humans have made their way through in their lives (whether powerful and influential or modest and insignificant): By mastering their language skills with people and using it for their advantage. In other words, Politics. Yet the written word has brought monstruous changes in our world and nourrishes the constantly changing scientific panorama. In the end, we obtain quite a good overview on how language itself, in a way or other, has been the key to creating the path we've followed while writing our own history.

Kittler's text was quite more challenging to assimilate in load of ideas, maybe because it tackles a more technological approach to things and applies it to the human perception to technology. What is fascinating about Kittler's text (which probably made it worth reading) is the things he questions; how does the input and output work when using a computer for our benefit and why doesn't that work differently? He also illustrates how we have changed our lifestyles and changed them into the digital era. This can bring some parallelism with Ong text. Is digital the new litterature? Is this a good shift? Will this bring development and evolution? These are questions that are valid and whose answers cannot be given completely, as we're still evolving and defining the way all this mass technology is going (or taking us). The examples provided by Kittler of our own history, like Goethe's Werther, Guttenberg and Laurie Anderson, also draw a good map of human perception and mass reaction towards "new" or "different" things, interesting enough to solidify his text "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter".