Extended Blog 1

Today’s society, as we see it, has been taken over by the media; whether it’s from television to video games to even the World Wide Web, everyone is using one or the other. The points made in the two articles, “The End of Literacy? Don’t Stop Reading” by Howard Gardner and “The Dumbing of America” by Susan Jacoby, and the two essays, “The Greek Legacy” by Eric Havelock and “Secondary Orality” by Walter Ong, all come down to one similarity: that the media is taking people away from written information. The importance of reading and writing has not been overemphasized. It has not been emphasized enough. Reading and allows our brains to grow and even expands your attention span. I agree with the claim that says the American culture will eventually become a oral and visual based society. Even myself included, many more people would prefer watching YouTube and watching television to get the latest news rather than reading it somewhere. Although “the decline of book, newspaper, and magazine reading is by now an old story”, people are still giving into the media and its ways of turning the society into a visual and oral one rather than a print based society.
In Howard Gardner’s article in the Washington Post called “The End of Literacy? Don’t Stop Reading,” he writes about computers are slowly getting rid of literacy. Students reading scores have been dwindling due to the lack of time they spend reading. Libraries had been made to allow people to pertain to the scholars who have information to share by reading their researches. “Half the adult population reads no books a year” (Gardner}. People prefer watching television to get current events rather than picking up a newspaper and reading it. Books allow readers “to enter a private world for hours or even days at a time” (Gardner). Nowadays, people feel the need to always be connected with someone because they cannot deal with being in complete solitude so they connect to people through Internet and such. Reading may make people feel as if they are all by themselves because they are not connected to someone through the Internet.
Susan Jacoby writes about how the media sucks people in and takes them away from reading making literacy rates slowly decrease in “The Dumbing of America.” Her title is self-explanatory for her article. She writes that if Richard Hofstadter, a Columbia University historian, were to still be alive “to write a modern-day sequel [to his previously published article], he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture” (1). The use of video has greatly overtaken the use of print. “In 1982, 82% of college graduates read novels or poems for leisure and within two decades the percentage of college graduates that read novels or poems for leisure decreased to 67% “ (1). The act of reading has significantly lessened. More than 40% of Americans under the age of 44 had not read a single book within a year and this was all due to the rise and advancing of cell phones, laptops, video games, etc. Many argue that when children are sucked into the television or into video games that they are not getting dumber, but that they are actually getting smarter and learning how to focus and expand their attention spans. This, however, was proven wrong because the “University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spend watching videos” (1). She writes that this “new American dumbness [is caused by] not lack of knowledge per se but the arrogance about that lack of knowledge” (2). What she means by this is the people who feel that they do not have to know certain things and they show no concern to learn new things.
In Eric Havelock’s “The Greek Legacy,” he starts off with writing that “the introduction of the Greek letters into inscription somewhere about 700 B.C. was to alter the character of human culture, placing a gulf between all alphabetic societies and their precursors” (Havelock, 38). In doing this, the Greeks invented literacy. It changed the way humans thought and brought upon a larger area and more ways for people to think. He writes that even in the earliest times, children were using stone and papyrus (when it was invented) to write and learn their alphabet. It shows the importance of reading and writing even in its earliest stages.
In Walter Ong’s “Secondary Orality” essay, he makes it very clear that print is essential to everything we do. “…even with a listener to stimulate and ground your thought, the bits and pieces of your thought cannot be preserved in jotted notes” (Ong, 51). It is necessary to be able to have written proof of an idea or of a thought that one has had in order for one to look back on it and remember it more clearly than having to remember it on one’s own. “In the total absence of any writing, there is nothing outside the thinker, no text, to enable him or her to produce the same line of thought again or even to verify whether he or she has done so or not” (Ong, 51). For example, if there was no written text about Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, anybody could easily take credit for that action but because all his thoughts were recorded on a piece of paper, there is total proof that Thomas Edison was indeed the inventor of the light bulb.
Although these different technologies have advanced and bettered our society in a countless number of ways, reading and writing are still very essential to our society in the educational sense. Technology, from here on out, will only become more advanced and improved, but this does not mean people should undermine the power of print and how it can make the society “smarter”.


Havelock, E. "The Greek Legacy". In D. Crowley, P. Heyer, (Eds.), Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.


Ong, W. "Orality, Literacy, and Modern Media". In D. Crowley, P. Heyer, (Eds.), Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Jacoby, S. "The Dumbing of America". The Washington Post. 17 February 2008. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021502901.html


Gardner, H. "The End of Literacy? Don't Stop Reading". The Washington Post. 17 February 2008. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021502898.html