[iDC] One Laptop Per Child - MIT/Negroponte Initiative

[John Hopkins]

>it is impossible to overestimate the degree to which literacy has
>subverted, usurped, conquered orality
>
>whenever and wherever oral cultures and literate cultures have met
>
>they have fought to the death
>
>and in every case
>
>every single case
>
>it is the oralists who have been defeated, destroyed, assimilated
>
>because literacy is more efficient
>
>and evolution rewards efficiency

thanks for that excerpt, John!

gotta catch the live aural/oralistical show sometime!

what's the next step, the answer posed by this over-arching dilemma 
that plagues us?  you have a beautiful poetics, and I understand it 
is an excerpt, but what about the solution to this migration to a 
technological efficiency in life (which is really nothing more than a 
mechanism for us to fit into the techno-social system)?

a simple return to human engagement, but more specifically, that 
engagement in a less mediated form.  It is the dependency on the 
techno-social systems which form us to their use when we use those 
means for engagement.  by exploring the lesser-mediated forms (oral, 
direct face-to-face), we are faced with the encounter with the widest 
possible unknown.  and it is precisely at that moment where 
transformative living takes place.

JOhn