((Socrates also goes into the way in ruins memory recall, saying “they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing.” This hints to the change of consciousness Ong talks about, which has both cost and advantage. But anyway.))

The current internet-based use of text allows for instant feedback like chat rooms, forums and blogs. You can also target your audience to a degree; depending on the website (www.catholics.com Versus http://www.athiests.com) you know what kind of reception your comments will bring about. The personal bio page (age/sex/height, favourite music, movies, books, etc) and avatar is a refinement of this. Text is closer than it has ever been to the oral form.

The most important example to consider is youtube.com. Youtube allows orators to exist and reply to each in a way as seamlessly as face to face conversation. Many people have gotten famous by simply braodcasting their opinions of an issue to the youtube community. The use of edits, cuts and re-recordings must be considered, but I don’t think these take away from this oral form of communication. I dare say it adds to this communicative form, allowing each side to refine and perfect their argument without long pauses and gaffs during conversation (as well as conversations occuring outside of physical restraint). Youtube also allows anyone to respond to any video at any point in time with their own video (or text). This creates conversation threads tethered to a new base, or reference point. These conversations would normally go unspoken due to the way conventional flows between two people.

In making his point to Phaedrus, however, Socrates first makes a speech about love in a negative manner and then makes a second speech about love in the opposite manner. Later, in articulating why a speech should be crafted with proper knowledge of truth, he poses a question: “Could someone, then, who doesn’t know what each thing is ever have the art to lead others little by little through similarities away from what is the case on each occasion to its opposite?” (262b). Socrates has just done this, of course. Not intentionally, perhaps, but it is here that a hint of Plato’s lesson is visible. As writings are rare in this time, speeches and dialogues are the main form of discourse. Here, in a (written) dialogue containing several speeches, Plato confronts and critiques the very medium he uses. Is it best (or even possible) to confront a medium from within, or would it be more effective to do so outside of that medium? It seems tricky at best to both speak of and step in the inherent pitfalls that a medium brings.

Plato inspired me to think about how people perceive you as a person. Also, Phaedrus perceived mind of the lover or the non lover. Socrates categorizes the lover and non lover being the same person with two different minds. I would like to know more about the self and how it is perceived.

Plato’s mistrust in the new technology applies well to our era where the appearance of any new media brings up fears of losing a tradition or a culture. Socrates remarks and opposition toward writing took me back to 1990s when I was studying Graphic Design. Those were the transition days from traditional hands-on techniques to desktop publishing. But a day did not pass without hearing a lecture on the values of hands-on work and the future failure of Computer Graphics. We were reminded by our professors, who feared that the new media would soon destroy their power and organization, that anything created on the computer was in fact without a soul. I now realize that they were challenged and afraid by the accessibility of the tools and the fact that everyone could now design.

Despite of the resistances, new media and technologies have transformed and are transforming the way we look at knowledge and the authorship of knowledge. I am not sure if I agree with Theuth, the inventor of letters, on that writing will make us wiser. But I do believe that the new media and the external memories have deeply expanded our learning power.

Phaedrus
In Plato’s work Phaedrus, the argument that taking the non-lover is better than taking the lover is convincing. For the relationship with the non-lover, friendship is the key to success in love. This type of friendship allows two people to improve upon one another and allows each other to be in control of themselves as individuals. The lover will adore you yet fear conflict because passion is overruled by judgment. True love arises and grows over time as we get to know and trust someone, whereas passion is short lived. Further discussion in “Phaedrus” is of the soul, which is difficult to digest as the subject of the soul is purely subjective. Do our souls really differ? Does the soul make one person more successful than another in love and life? Another subject touched on was speaking and the point was made by Phaedrus that truth can be overlooked by a persuasive speaker. Doesn’t knowing as many facts as possible help the speaker be more persuasive? The discussions between Phaedrus and Socrates surprisingly end in prayer.

I found Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics a very compelling read. Saussure justified his ideas on linguistic theory through a more “scientific” approach. Whether legitimate or not, if you subscribe to his theories you could surely justify it through his article, as it is quite thorough (even if not as sturdy as he asserts). He is sure to build his theory of the linguistic system block-by-block, based on signifiers and the signified (sound-images and the concepts they evoke, respectively), or units. He begins by simply stating that “speaking” is independent and separate from “language”, at least from the viewpoint of the individual. To clarify, the individual subscribes to the “language” of the time and geographic area they are in, but language is independent of the individual in its diachronic characteristics. It takes more than one person to change the language. This point bothered me.

I’m not sure that this point qualifies in the current time period. Saussure theorized and taught in the early 20th century when the technology that affected one’s influence and power was not available. In his time, one would have to spend a lifetime perfecting a thesis or theory, then publish it, then likely die before their influence caught fire and spread throughout the nation or world, thereby possibly changing the language (style, words’ meanings, etc.). Currently, anyone can publish their thoughts (no mater how malformed) on a blog, comment board, tweet, etc. in a matter of seconds and reach an audience of millions within the minute. This greatly influences the impact of the individual on culture, and thus language. Take President (Elect – for the next 13 hours) Obama, for an example. His media campaign has run virally through the country, even the world, and has changed culture in the past 30 months. I believe that Saussure does not account for cultural impact of the individual simply because there were not the tools available at that time to indicate that a threat to static language this big could exist.

For the time, Saussure makes a very valid point and achieves a great characterization and analysis of the human language. He resists other ideas that language is highly malleable and presents a very concrete argument on the scientific (even mathematical) elements of language through his analysis of semiology. A point that seems to have held up through time since this was recorded was the idea that “everywhere and always there is the same complex equilibrium of terms that mutually condition each other” and that signs within language in their totality are positive, but we conceive true meaning from signs by their negative values through consideration of both the signified and the signifier, or by comparison to other signs. Put frankly, “in language there are only differences.” Interestingly, signs can only be perceived as “positive” because of their “negative” parts (signified and signifier). He concludes that in a linguistic system, the substance of sign is of less importance than the signs around it linguistically because their is no meaning without comparison to other signs. This seems to be a novel truth of language.

When I was reading the article, I was being led by the author and thinking in the way as someone who only speaks western languages, therefore I was trying to demonstrate these principles in my head by thinking of some English words. Of course, both principles stand correct.

But I wanted to see if Saussure’s system works on my mother language — mandarin Chinese. And surprisingly, it does. For example, in Chinese, ? (wong) has been the word used to describe the sound of dogs’ barking for years and no one ever questions it. But when you think about it, for Chinese being a hieroglyph-based language, it makes no sense. Why would a word usually used to describe something that looks watery or ocean-like, which has no connection to the animals or sounds, be chosen to represent the sound of dog’s barking? Apparently the word was chosen just because it sounded like barking (onomatopoeia). When one considers this matter in writing, the word ?, which carries the component that symbolizes water in traditional Chinese, would never be used to describe sounds. But then again, it was difficult for me to think of writing and language as two different things.

If there really is something that I have to say just to prove that I actually thought about these principles, was that when it comes to writing in ancient languages that based on images or objects (hieroglyph), the choices of words are not arbitrary. Quite on the contrary, they were carefully created, evolved, assimilated with other dialects, and then selected to become what is being used today. But then, this article was more about language as a combination of concept and sound image instead of focusing on the writing. So I guess it makes no sense to bully Saussure about it.

Nico

The definition of the “self-moving” soul had some type of religious theme (this needs clarification or discussion). Also, the declaration of the revolution for “pure knowledge” seems congruent with some of trends in today’s network society.

Regarding Saussure, I had some trouble following his arguments with the exception of the “chess game”, I was confused with his definitions for “Semiology” because I was thinking of Semiotics. I will continue to re-read both pieces to see if I come up with any more questions or observations.

David