[130]
David M. Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in
the Digital Age (New York: Arcade, 2001), 104. The italics are Levy’s.
[131]
Nicole K. Speer, Jeremy R. Reynolds, Khena M. Swallow, and
Jeffrey M.Zacks, “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of
Visual and Motor Experiences,” Psychological Science, 20, no. 8 (2009):
989-99. Gerry Everding, “Readers Build Vivid Mental Simulations of
Narrative Situations, Brain Scans Suggest,” Washington University (St.
Louis)
info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/13325.html
[132]
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoughts on Modem Literature,” Dial,
October 1840.
[133]
Ong, Orality and Literacy, 8.
[134]
Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 152.
[135]
Wolf, Proust and the Squid, 217-18.
[136]
Some people have suggested that communication on the Internet,
which tends to be brief, informal, and conversational, will return us to an
oral culture. But that seems unlikely for many reasons, the most important
being that the communication does not take place in person, as it does in oral
cultures, but rather through a technological intermediary. Digital messages
are disembodied. “The oral word,” wrote Walter Ong, “never exists in a
simply verbal context, as a written word does. Spoken words are always
modifications of a total, existential situation, which always engages the
body. Bodily activity beyond mere vocalization is not adventitious or
contrived, but is natural and even inevitable.” Ong, Orality and Literacy, 67-
68.
[137]
Public Broadcasting System, “A Science Odyssey: People and
Discoveries:
Lee
de
Forest,”
undated,
www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databanlVentries/btfore.html
. For an excellent
