Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

The Ever-Shifting Tide of Communication and Civil Literacy

Smart Mobs: To the class of 2004.

Last night, at a small dinner party here, I took some time out as host to scan four photographs that a guest had kindly brought.  The pictures are of petrographs that she saw while visiting Africa in 2000.  I am touched by the eons that mankind has found expression for itself for whatever purpose, including none but for its own sake.

Petrograph and photograph: Each is ephemeral; all endure as connections and expressions of who we are and of what matters to us at the time, some evoking resonance in the human spirit across millennia.

I have been collecting material of this kind as part of a project that recognizes general literacy (and the communication of abstract concepts) as a recent phenomena. Wide-spread civil literacy is just today happening in the world.

We forget, in the immediate generations, how recent are so many ideas and discussions. Not much more recently than our time, those concepts had no existence.  Neither pharmacology nor socialized medicine nor pharmaceutical industry would be recognizable on the public agenda one century ago. "Public agenda" wouldn't have much currency either.  Neither neo-conservative nor AARP existed in the Great Depression, though their harbingers can be identified.  Without the nascent civil literacy of the 18th century, it seems impossible that we would have had the revolutionary ideas of the relationship of people to each other and government to commemorate here every July 4th.

Philosophers and historians note that there has been perpetual tension between what we lately speak of as individual liberty and social cohesion.  These are increasingly the subject of civil literacy, expressed both in concept and in deed.  Along with that conversation is a new concern over the instituting of empire in forms and extent that were impossible before this age.  One may well ask whether every reform in human affairs invites its own corruption, and has it been ever thus?

Today, Howard Rheingold delivered an address to the graduating class of Stanford University's Communication Department.  This speech is being delivered at an institution that is barely a century old, named for a youth who died of typhoid fever during a visit from California to Italy in 1884. Herbert Hoover, in the first graduating class, studied geology and was known for his humanitarian efforts before he became the 31st President of the United States.  Today, there will also be a commencement address by a 1950's Stanford graduate, the first woman ever appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

These are but a few reminders of the marvelous journey that we are swimmers in.  Howard's charge is for these newly minted communicators and journalists to restore the civil conversation to its promise and preserve civil literacy for us all. David Weinberger has provided the nutshell summary.

What is at issue is the very nature of humankind, the image we have of our limits and possibilities. History is not yet done with its exploration.... of what it means to be human. - C. Wright Mills

posted by orcmid at 6/13/2004 10:09:12 AM