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devorah hill
Never played Galaga.
Slavoj Žižek is interesting.
About Carr: I am paraphrasing Carr in his "From Papyrus to iPad: The Evolution of Reading" video on big think.com, "Reading was an adjunct to oral communication. Most of human history we just conversed and exchanged information through speech. One of the interesting things about early writing is that there were no spaces between the words. People just wrote in continuous script. And that's because that's the way we hear speech."
I disagree with that statement. We hear speech with its pauses, intonations. The struggle with the written word (to this day) is transposing the experience of hearing/audibly to hearing mentally. He then goes on to say that early reading was done out loud so that you could hear where things began and ended. That it was not until 800 0r 900 that word spaces came into being, making reading easier and thus we came to "silent" reading. "Silent" reading became the event by which an individual was immersed in the improvement of their mind. He goes on to say that after the printing press and the wider distribution of books one of the "central facts of culture" was the emersion of ourselves in deep solitary reading. This is an extremely Eurocentric perspective that demonstrates a complete lack of deconstruction of perspectives. During the same time that he is discussing there were civilizations with oral traditions that mandated profound discipline in the memorization and recitation of scientific, historical, cultural and spiritual concepts. In these traditions the "immersion of ourselves in the improvement of the mind" was a collective practice. This may seem like nit picking but it is not.
When cultures for whom the written tradition was sacrosanct met those with an oral or pictographic tradition they disregarded their history, philosophy and their spirituality. The fetishistic value placed the written tradition over all others became the bench mark by which western European cultures justified the nullification of other people's history. So, while I find Carr interesting, I think he could do with some introspection and deconstruction of his Eurocentric patriarchy.
