Shift from Aural to Alphabetic Consciousness

Discussion

William Irwin Thompson:

"The shift from aural to alphabetic consciousness, as articulated by cultural historians like Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock and more recently Leonard Shlain (1998), is an external, sociological way of perceiving this cultural transformation. Steve Farmer’s argument that the portability of writing materials served to stimulate the efflorescence of archaistic syncretisms in the face of innovation is another way of expressing McLuhan’s triad that one new medium obsolesces a current medium and retrieves a previously obsolesced medium. In my own work and in Paolo Soleri’s work in the 1970s — through the influence of Teilhard de Chardin’s concepts — we termed this process ‘miniaturization’."

(http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.8.5742&rep=rep1&type=pdf)