Rant-- week 7?

Although at first I was a little bit intimidated by the length of this weeks reading, I actually found it very fascinating. I thought that the connections that the author drew were very interesting, and occasionally surprising. Although I knew that the medieval church was the sort of center of learning and ideas during the medieval period, I had never spent a lot of time thinking about why the church was so predominate at that time. Although I suppose that it is sort of obvious that one must study the communication technology of a given historical period to fully understand why certain ideas are prevalent at that time, it is not something that I would have automatically thought to examine.

One of the things that I found the most interesting in this piece of writing was the idea that words are powerful, even magical. Although I was somewhat familar with this idea from mythology, for example the idea that telling someone your name gives them a sort of power over you, it was still interesting to me that there was a time when people outside of mythology actually felt that way. For example, the idea that someone with the ability to write or copy a religious work was a sort of a "middleman" between God and man. As much as we value education, specifically literacy, in the modern world, I don't think there is anyone who would think of the ability to read and write as being magical.

And yet, literacy is power. This truth became especially apparent in the article when the author was speaking about censorship. He did say that many classical works were neglected during this time period because they were not seen as relevant, as much as they were specifically being "censored." But even if they were not purposely being ignored, the end result is the same. In a place where knowledge and education is concentrated in the hands of a few, those few people's ideas will be imposed on the masses as absolute truths. When this happens, it is almost inevitable that some voices will be supressed, whether it is intentional or not. And no matter how well-meaning such ideas are, this is never a good thing.

Although the printing press, the internet, and a thousand other advances in technology have changed our society in the last few hundred years, I think it is really important to remember this lesson. Democracy is based upon lots of different ideas vying for attention. We should remember that just because we disagree with someone's ideas, it is important that we still recognize them and discuss them as a society. I hope that I don't sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I think that it is important for us to pay attention to alternative news sources, such as blogs. The internet is full of potentially dangerous ideas, but the streamlining of information is also dangerous. Understanding different perspectives is important. And literacy, and the ability to express oneself eloquently, is still a form of power. One person's idea might help to change a lot of people's opinions, and in a way that kind of is magic.