Amanda Capper - Ordered Reality

 Throughout the semester, I have been thinking about one of the main themes of the class - how our senses make up our ordered reality. How what we see, taste, feel, hear, and smell builds the foundation for what we know. My question is, how does this change when a society that was once an oral society changes into a textual-dependent one? Because people who depend on written text like we do obviously still have senses that we use to structure our world. But I think it could be boiled down to the fact that the focus is different. For example, in oral societies, people are focused more on the people around them, their environment, their space/place. But for text-dependent societies, it is not that we have necessarily lost these things, but rather that we are more focused on words to give us meaning, rather than the world around us. 


Going off of this, I genuinely think its interesting, because it shows that we have a strong tendency to become a little unattached and attentive to our surroundings. For example, going from class to class I often check texts on my phone. Because of this, I am looking down at a screen instead of the other students, the Great Lawn, and even sometimes, where I am going lol. I usually don't like the framing of this rhetoric, because it puts technology in the place as a villain, when it is actually our savior in a lot of senses. It has notes, a timer, a search engine, social media, pictures, etc. etc. But I digress. 

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