James Marriott
speaker
547 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 31 Aug
James Marriott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 5.
Appearances
And my fear is that if we lose reading, and there's pretty convincing statistics to suggest that reading isn't just falling, but...
I mean, really almost collapsing, like falling really severely, I think we could lose democracy.
I think we haven't tried to do democracy without a culture of mass literacy.
And this is a kind of terrifying experiment that we're embarking on, and one that I'm not convinced is going to go very well.
Before mass reading...
Yeah, exactly.
And this is what another of my heroes, the great scholar Walter Ong in his book Orality and Literacy, calls an oral culture, where everything you know about the world is passed on by word of mouth.
And the really brilliant point he makes about these kind of oral societies is that every single piece of information you want to preserve...
If you can't write it down, you have to store it in your memory.
And this totally shapes the entire culture in ways that I think it's hard for us to get our heads around because we're so used to remembering things by writing them down.
But if you can't write anything down, the only way to preserve information is to, as he says, think memorable thoughts, which means that every single piece of information that you preserve has to come encoded
in a memorable form.
So information is spread through cliches and proverbs and songs and heavily rhythmic poetry and it's stored in exciting stories.
There's a whole theory that the Iliad is basically this enormous mnemonic device is the phrase.
It's basically this enormous exciting story that is a way of storing all the most vital information by ancient Greek culture.
We view it as like a story.
Actually, it's full of information about customs, sacrifices, religion.
And because it's an exciting story and because it's highly rhythmic, you can commit it to memory.
And in an oral culture, you need to preserve huge quantities of information about your society in your memory.
And this means that oral cultures are very preoccupied with the past.
Showing 441–460 of 547 · page 23 of 28
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