Journal 5: Post-literacy and the History Major

The philosopher Marshall McLuhan and his ideas were the topics of Tuesday’s class this week. McLuhan’s views on the ethics of technology are different and slightly more positive than those that we’ve already discussed (such as the theories of Ellul, Dreyfus, and Borgmann). According to McLuhan, technological progress and innovations create a fundamental shift in our society and culture. In viewing human history as more cyclical than linear, McLuhan argues that we human beings are moving from a literate, written, visual culture into a post-literate, oral, "global village" society in which individualism is dying and the book is no longer needed or wanted. All this is due to new technologies, McLuhan believes, which is shaping our experiences and the way we process these experiences cognitively. Because devices like the radio, TV, telephone and even the Internet emphasize learning through hearing instead of seeing, our society is being taught orally and not visually. This, in turn, is making such visual learning apparatuses as the book obsolete. Furthermore, McLuhan assures the reader that this technology and the changes it brings are inevitable, and so, we must try to adapt to it as well as we are able.
This point of view becomes problematic and frightening to historians and students of history (like me). If our society becomes completely oral, what happens to history? Historians today already have great difficulty analyzing and extracting facts from pre-literate, oral societies. If we stop writing down events, thoughts and stories, how will we keep track of what has happened in our past? Will history die? In McLuhan’s point of view, history and historians are no longer needed. Instead of being upset about that, we should learn to adapt to a world without history.
As a future historian, I do not want my life’s work to mean nothing. I am not about to accept the fact that history is worthless in the future. I’ve learned from my history and historiography that history is, indeed, very important. It reminds us of where we’ve been and helps us to learn from our successes and our failures. Everything we do today and will do tomorrow is effected by what we’ve done yesterday. History, then, is something worth fighting for, in my opinion.
I will take McLuhan’s advice in one way: I will not be upset by this disturbing trend, but instead, I will adapt to it. In an oral society, history can still be kept alive. It does not need to die. With the recording technology we have today, historians can recite what they know and what they believe into a recorder, and in this way, history can be kept alive for generations. Indeed, without the written word, history is impaired, but it need not die. We, the historians for the future, can adapt to and take advantage of the technology of today to keep history alive in a post-literate, oral society.