BP #3

Knowledge is history and if you don’t have any evidence to back up your argument, you don’t have a voice. Trask, Rath and Gee show us that knowledge can be manipulated. As a society grows it takes shape by the people inside. In the animal world for example, if two lions are put on an island with other animals, they take over the Eco system. In our society we are more evolved and use language and technology to influence each other.

Hawaii is an amazing place full of culture. The history of Hawaii is built upon the sayings of outsiders peaking in. Trask a native from Hawaii says, “And when they wrote that we were racist because we preferred our own ways to theirs, they meant that their culture needed to dominate other cultures”. How long does it take to understand a culture especially one so vast as Hawaiian? Without exploring the culture of the islands in depth, historians release their findings. Anyone can write and post anything online with technology but its up to us to supervise each other.

Our voices carry weight with the way we communicate. But communication can be influenced by other factors. Rath explains, “knowledge is distributed rather than centralized in the new media. But the distribution of knowledge across a human network was precisely the flaw that print and literacy corrected through the centralizing of knowledge in authoritative editions”. Media is circulating throughout the world and its being taken advantage. With so much knowledge being passed around, a system was put in place. Media needed evidence to back up claims. Without proof of knowledge given to the people, documents or knowledge were told to consume will not be accepted by the majority. This is a reassurance for society to not be influenced by lies.

Evidence is needed for knowledge to be given to a person. With just findings being released, a reader can poke holes into the text. According to Gee, “The voice behind the text cannot respond or defend itself. And it cannot vary its substance and tone to speak differently to different readers based on their natures and contexts”. A voice can be perceived very differently depending on who is reading. Once a text is sent out into the world it effects everyone. Before sending out information we need understand the culture behind the text, the form to pass on this text and with proper evidence. Knowledge is key to understanding literacy but without the research or background it will be seen as a manipulation by society.

Bonus:

In class we discussed the Apparatus chart. It’s broken down into three sections: Orality, Literacy and Electracy. Marshall McLuhan says, “The ultimate conflict between sight and sound, between written and oral kinds of perception and organization of existence is upon us”. The relation between written and oral is in the apparatus chart and McLuhan perceives this struggle. As we cultivate our minds, we start focusing on one more then the other. With Electracy an additional battle is occurring for dominance in our minds. What we use often will defeat the other two leaving us less of a whole when we try to perceive knowledge.