The Word

I took a course in media ecology in college last year in which one of the readings we discussed was called The Humiliation of the Word by Jacques Ellul. Now this is going to sound terrible but I didn't actually read the book as it was part of a group project section where small groups gave detailed presentations about each book. I do, however, plan to read the book one day. It sounded incredibly interesting and despite having not actually read it, the fact that it had such an impact should count for something. Right?

The gist of Ellul's book was that the Word (many times referring to the divine word but also to human speech and writing) has been degraded and is no longer revered as it once was and still should be. The Word is Truth but we no longer associate truth with either the spoken or written word. The visual rather than the verbal has become supreme in our culture of images and screens.

While the synopsis was hard to follow at times for anyone who had not read the book (we've all been through those presentations), the general idea fit perfectly into the topics we had been discussing all semester. Namely, the changing media we are exposed to and how it changes us and our environment as well as how to cautiously approach and harness it properly without abusing it.

Throughout the course we read a number of books and looked at statistics that show an alarming trend of people who no longer read. In David Bauerlein's book The Dumbest Generation he describes such people as not illiterate but a-literate. They can read. They just choose not to. As a result of our "Age of the Screen" many people simply do not have the attention span needed to sit down and read for 30 minutes, let alone 3 hours. I find this trend to be rather sad all told. I love the unique experience that a book provides in taking you to places you can never go and introducing you to all sorts of people who can reveal so much about your own experience despite living in a completely different world. Some of the books on my shelves are among my oldest friends. I can't imagine my life now if I has not grown up with Anne Shirley, Frodo and Sam, Jonas from The Giver, the folkish Saaski, or Fiver and Hazel.