'Trashing Old Technologies'. A human pasttime.

I've just finished reading chapter four in Ong and his section about 'writing is a technology' where he mentions music got me to thinking about the effects that technology has had on music.

I went to Dropkick Murphy, whom is a very big Irish Punk Band From Boston (The song playing in Scorsese's Departed all the time is called I'm Shipping up To Boston). Anyone who's ever been to a concert will tell you if they think they're any good in person our live our however you'd like to call it. Which brings me to the fact that electronics have allowed musicians to vastly change their own voices as well as how well everything sounds.


I, personally, Love live music; there is no other way to listen to it. I've been to huge concerts, small concerts, I've sat in a room of twenty other people while a band, after the crowd had left, unhooked anything electronic, stepped off stage and everyone formed a circle around them and sang 'The Throes' a six minute ballad word for word with the band. The thing is, music's loosing it's human touch or so it would seem. Literally though. fingertips no longer need touch anything to produce the same effect. Clubs play "techno" or technological music that's just beats put together amongst other things. Music seems to be slowly slipping more and more into a new electronic technology where it's not only duplicated but created inside of the electronics. Catch my drift?

What I'm wondering is what is the effect on Writing going to be? Sure there is text messaging which is leading to horrible spelling that's becoming very easy to discern, but is that a bad thing? Perhaps were just heading back to how the Hebrews did things?

-like how a writer goes through his letters, stories, or essays and takes out all the useless words, phrases and sentences.

-who's to say technology's not just weeding out the things that mainstream media doesn't need to survive.......or to be bothered with for the time.......

And this 'trashing of outdated technology' reminds me of what ong says in the last paragraph of chapter four;


"By the sixteenth century rhetoric textbooks were commonly ommiting from the traditional five parts of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery) the fourth part, memory, which was not applicable tow riting. They were also minimizing the last part, delivery. By and large, they made these changes with specious explanations or no explanation at all. Today, when curricla list rhetoric as a subject, it usually means simply the study of how to write effectively."

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