[Air-L] Plato and writing

[Jonathan Sterne, Dr.]

The best statement of the media theory reading the Phaedrus is probably chapter 1 of John Durham Peters’ Speaking into the Air.

I think the persistence of McLuhan and Ong’s explanations of orality (autocorrected to “morality” so draw your own conclusions) and literacy can be chalked up to some of the following:

—they are compellingly written and easy to understand explanations of complex phenomena.

— media history has a modern bias which means most people in the field wouldn’t know where to to to fact check.  In other words, McLuhan and Ong are often the only texts people in media studies know on the subject.  Maybe Havelock or Innis, maybe Eisenstein.  But there’s a huge body of scholarship in the history of the book that reads very differently.

—there is also almost complete ignorance of the findings of modern archaeology in media studies (even among most of the media archaeologists) , which would transform our understandings of the emergence of human communication.  For an example from another field, see Gary Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music.

— it is easy for (white?) readers to somehow read past McLuhan’s racism and Ong’s theology (in part because Orality and Literacy is scrubbed of the mysticism in Presence of the Word).

And a self-citation for good measure:  https://sterneworks.org/TheologyofSound.pdf

—Jonathan