Twenty-Six Theses on Textual Technologies
Twenty-Six Theses on Textual Technologies
Here's 7 to get you started...
Jeff Bilbro, drawing from his new book, proposes “Twenty-Six Theses on Textual Technologies,” one thesis for each letter of the alphabet.
Here are 7 to get you started . . .
One: Language is primarily a relational (rather than a representational) technology. Words articulate our relationships to God, other humans, our environment, and even ourselves.
Five: Truth is ultimately dramatic or symphonic, not propositional.
Six: To know the truth is to be in tune with a complex, polyphonic reality. One might say that a “fact” is “true” if it helps us relate to the world in a more proper, harmonious, beautiful, healthy, or just manner.
Eight: The highest use of language is to serve friendship, and the kinds of conversations our textual technologies encourage will shape the kinds of friendship that are imaginable.
Nine: Cultures develop the technologies they desire, and the technologies a culture uses shape its desires. One might call this recursive causation.
Fourteen: Print and pixels do have certain differences: Print renders ideas as solid—they feel graspable, reliable, fixed. Pixels render ideas as ephemeral—they appear from a distant cloud or web, and we surf them as they float away.
Twenty-Five: The Enlightenment subject, the buffered self, is a creature of print. The postmodern subject, the anxious, lonely, identity-morphing self, is a creature of pixels.
Bilbro’s book is Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope. Find out more about his book here.