A Better Pencil Pt 1

Before reading these chapters in A Better Pencil, I hadn’t realized the extensiveness and evolution of writing and creation of the pencil. According to this book, Thoreau was one of the first to use the graphite pencil to write down his thoughts. Plato had claimed that writing down everything will lead to lack of memory and must be trained without writing things down. I believe this has somewhat happened in today’s culture due to the amount of technology we all use in a day. Our society has also had smaller attention spans and can use the assorted technology to obtain any information within the Internet’s grasp.

The evolution of technology, as simple as a clay tablet in the beginning, has led some to believe we are getting lazy. The books description of writing with a clay tablet sounds a lot more extensive to write out something simple than today we can grab a piece of paper and pencil (or type on basically anything electronic). From the clay tablet, to quills, to pencils, and now to typing; the amount of time we use for writing has diminished. Some input has been said that the amount of time writing has reduced the amount of meaning we put into writing. Books and writing in the middle centuries had become expensive and rare commodities thanks to a small group of literate people and the cost of creating them.

 It was interesting to find other variations of the graphite pencil making its way around the world and the ones I am familiar with. The ones I am including are Conte crayons and Staedtler pencils. Both of these are used mostly in drawing and are a mixture with graphite to create certain effects. Sadly I see the future of technology diminishing our memory usage, lack of using real speech (ex: “internet speak”), but aids in the connectivity of the world. I guess it all depends on what you believe is too much technology and what you’d rather hold onto the past. 

Achebe Pt 2

There are three distinct parts of this book both marked and unmarked, they correspond as the first part of most of the life of Okonkwo, when his family is exiled, and when the family moves back to Omuofia after their exiled years are over. During their exile, the missionaries infiltrate the town of Mbanta and when they return to Omuofia, they are found their too. The chapters had changed from how they were organized in the beginning of the book; at first they were as we had discussed in class “episodic” and once the missionaries moved in, the writing was less so. There was more speaking mentioned, but had to be between the Igbo and the missionaries because they obviously didn’t speak the same language. The lack of “speaking” in the first parts of this book let me to believe that they did not mention the speaking as much because the people of the group had known the customs and knew what to do.

I also was a little bit confused with the ending, which seemed so sudden of Okonkwo’s death. Did he realize that their lives were going to be permeated by the missionaries and it was such a crushing thought that he would rather not be part of that future? Was it part of one of their customs, which seemed opposite of what his people said that suicide was an abomination. Achebe seemed to build the story of Okonkwo and his life with much more gusto in the beginning but his immediate death was so unlike the beginning writing.  

Achebe Pt 1

First of all, if it was not mentioned this was African literature, then I would have thought it could have taken place anywhere around the world. Some of the actions that occurred during this first reading of the book have similar characteristics to other cultures. They ‘converse’ and abide by whoever is known as the “oracle” and reference a “personal god” of chi. When hearing of an oracle I related the thought to ancient Greece where they would make sacrifices and hear of the future or other information brought to them by the oracle. The chi aspect I thought of the Asian cultures who think of chi as a balance of a life force and doing certain things in your life can affect it.

Another aspect that may have clued me in to this being centralized in Africa is that their main harvest was yams. To Okonkwo and the rest of the village, yams are a “man’s crop” and must be harvested and grown by them. I had heard once that yams have been known to boost the number of multiples in some African tribes; this also brings up the strange point brought up in the book that multiples were deemed evil, and either one was saved or all were gotten rid of. I find this quite counterintuitive because they are eating the food that is creating the multiples and then they are trying to rid of what they created. Once Ezinma got sick, it was made known that Ekwefi had had trouble with keeping her children alive past infancy, and so it looked to me that they were having population control issues or something along those lines. 

Walter Ong, Part 2

Technology to our world today is mostly referring to computers and digital technology; thousands of years ago it was the simple use of writing. With any sort of new technology, and stated by Walter Ong, that it does not degrade life, but enhances it. I believe that with writing thousands of years ago because it helped with the use of communication between people. Writing to past centuries was like the latest gadget coming out and we would have to relearn and redesign everything to fit this model. From the book it sounds like all technology has always enhanced life (i.e. military weapons technology is good for generally one side). For one person the next statement made more sense for technology being good interiorized, meaning to me that it is specific to that people.

Also from Ong’s book he stated “the use of technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the spirit, and intensify its interior life;” I’m guessing that he was referring more to the use of writing and expanding of knowledge for humans. For today’s world, I don’t believe that all technology, digitally based, is always “enriching the psyche and intensifying its interior life.” Although the connectivity of life can be useful, I believe we’ve become too dependent on it. It enhances it in the ways we need them to, as in healthcare and safety, but the far reaches of the Internet can suck some people in and they can become addicted to it. Knowing the difference between right and wrong of information can hinder the ability of having a good ‘web experience.’

And so technology can go either way with enhancing life, either used in a good way to help people but not in an over self indulgent way of sitting in front of a computer all day wasting your time.

Walter Ong, Part 1

From Ong’s Orality and Literacy, I found the difference in memory usage of oral and written language had both their good and bad points. In the oral society’s, remembering something is to repeat and count back to something in a loop system to refresh the memory. With writing language down, the amount of brain power to remember diminishes compared to the oral society since their reference to something occurring becomes an outside factor. Oral language is faster to translate face to face, while written can be faster is sent as a quick note. Speaking with someone who doesn’t speak the same language can definitely hinder the information being shared, and also can go for writing; some languages have their own symbols for words (i.e. Mandarin). Although I believe our society is a heavily written society, I tend to remember things that have happened on a loop; if there is time to think about nothing, there are usually old memories that have come to mind.

This can also bring forth the fact for redundancy, the same memories are reviewed over and over and little bits are lost each time; with oral societies they must have better memory to recall much more detail. Like the ancient rhetors, they used a system of mnemonics, repetition, and mental imagery to remember long speeches to recite. So if for the future and using computers now more than writing, will we lose even more memory usage? From the oral society’s to written, Ong claimed that much more thought went into writing down the words, and if we can type even faster and translate the information, will people lose more of their brain power used for memory?