The major purpose of this book is to illustrate and explain the fundamental similarities and correspondences between humankind's oldest and newest thought-technologies: oral tradition and the Internet. Despite superficial differences, both technologies are radically alike in depending not on static products but rather on continuous processes, not on "What?" but on "How do I get there?" In contrast to the fixed spatial organization of the page and book, the technologies of oral tradition and the Internet mime the way we think by processing along pathways within a network. In both media it's pathways--not things--that matter.  To illustrate these ideas, this volume is designed as a "morphing book," a collection of linked nodes that can be read in innumerable different ways. Doing nothing less fundamental than challenging the default medium of the linear book and page and all that they entail, Oral Tradition and the Internet shows readers that there are large, complex, wholly viable, alternative worlds of media-technology out there--if only they are willing to explore, to think outside the usual, culturally constructed categories. This "brick-and-mortar" book exists as an extension of The Pathways Project (http://pathwaysproject.org), an open-access online suite of chapter-nodes, linked websites, and multimedia all dedicated to exploring and demonstrating the dynamic relationship between oral tradition and Internet technology
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Thinking beyond the page, and providing a rich nexus of human thought
"This workadds a decisive and stunning new dimension to John Miles Foley's already distinguished contributions to the study of oral traditions--ancient, medieval, and modern. His demonstration that they share significant features with the composition and communication of cultural production deploying digital technology and the internet will provoke a major upheaval in the study of long-term media history."--Thomas Pettitt, coeditor of The Ballad As Narrative: Studies in the Ballad Tradition of England, Scotland, Germany, and Denmark
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Thinking beyond the page, and providing a rich nexus of human thought

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780252078699
Publisert
2012-08-02
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Illinois Press
Høyde
235 mm
Bredde
156 mm
Dybde
36 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet

Forfatter

Biographical note

John Miles Foley is William H. Byler Chair in the Humanities, Curators' Professor of Classical Studies and English, and the director of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri at Columbia. He is the author or editor of twenty books, including How to Read an Oral Poem.