Took a break from blogging this weekend to visit the Science Museum of Minnesota and its exhibit, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World. A long drive, but it gave hubby and I two whole days without the little girl, so that was kind of nice.
In light of this class, it seemed ironic that I was looking at a scrap of the world's oldest copies of Genesis and Leviticus while learning about and reading about new content being created at the drop of a few typographical characters and bandwidth every few seconds. These scrolls took days, weeks, and months to create, and the handwriting is tiny.
It also brought back the value of learning in the age of the internet and the printing press. So few people were literate in those days, whereas now very few people can't read. So few people reading also meant that only a few people had the "power" or the "knowledge" to pass along. On the flip side, because so few people could read, they often didn't trust the written word, instead trusting in the oral tradition. Whereas we want something in writing, they wanted something to be "as good as its word."
What is the value of an oral tradition in a world of internet traffic and an abundance of written words?
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