One brief shining moment that was print?
Schank is pretty adamant that oral culture is preferable to print culture. Shortly before wondering why he was required to read certain (or perhaps any) texts, he wrote:
Reading is going away. Books are going away. There are already better ways of disseminating knowledge. But the schools are difficult to change. Training is difficult to change. People who use the internet can’t imagine a life without the tools that are on there now. But there are new tools coming.
The main advantage of reading is that we can skip around. We skim rather than read. It is hard to skim when someone is talking. And then one day, maybe it won’t be.
The claim that books are going away fits well with what's referred to as the Gutenberg Parenthesis - a view that sees the almost 600 years of print culture as a fleeting, perhaps even anomalous, interval in the ongoing oral and visual communications methods that define human culture. Though this approach is somewhat similar to Walter Ong's conception of Secondary Orality, they seem to differ in the sense that Ong viewed the new orality as stemming from and being anchored in the possibilities of print culture, while the parenthesis approach seems to suggest, as does Schank, that we were shackled by it and can now be freed from it.
According to this view, the death of the paragraph that Devlin wrote about may simply herald an era in which we learn through rhythm and melody rather than through print. There's something even captivating in this idea, though it's difficult to imagine how a drumbeat might be able to communicate truly complex concepts. Reverting to drumbeats may be a rather extreme, but it seems that academics may no longer feel they need print.
Schank acknowledges one of the great advantages of print - that it allows us to skip around or skim. Finding a particular spot on a page is considerably easier than finding one in a video, and one of the great advantages of digital text is that it's easily searchable. Before the 2008 U.S. elections Google offered a tool that permitted search for text in YouTube videos related to the elections. A report on the tool is accessible, but the tool itself seems to have disappeared. I have a vague recollection of a considerably earlier iteration of this. Then President Clinton's testimony to the Starr Commission investigators appeared on YouTube and there was a mechanism that made it possible to search for specific text ("cigar" was the obvious choice), but I can't seem to find any reference to this.
Go to: What's the matter with plain old text?