Abstract
The educational use of computers is changing the way people think and steering culture toward a more functional and self-conscious form of literacy. This supposition is based in Walter Ong's theory of orality and literacy (maintaining that literacy caused a removal from immediate, everyday existence and enabled the development of an analytical sense of a separate self) which he uses to explain the profound changes in human consciousness brought about by the technologizing of the word. Ong's notion of reflexive intelligence provides a theoretical framework, a skeleton of symbolic relations onto which descriptions may be structured, that accommodates the desire to examine the hypothesis at a philosophical, social, political, and educational level concurrently. Connections exist between J. D. Bolton's description of what is happening to human consciousness in the transition from print to computer and Ong's description of what happened when people moved from primary orality to literacy. Just as Plato was afraid writing would dull the mind, cause people to rely on external characters that are not part of themselves and mistake the "appearance of wisdom" for wisdom, operational literacy may encourage utility, cause people to rely on what their network "thinks" and mistake technique for knowledge. (Twenty-three references are attached.) (RS)
Citation
Karovsky, P. Real Time Literacy. Retrieved March 21, 2023 from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/145883/.
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