Read the Book Draft

Chapter 2: Three Traditions

Before we dive into the three catalysts of social change today, we need to understand more of the historical context that has shaped our current world. For the purposes of this book, we will roughly divide history into three sections: oral tradition, written tradition and visual tradition.

Oral Tradition

For 5500+ years, societal forms, traditions, and knowledge were substantively communicated and passed down through word of mouth. When we speak of the oral tradition, we usually think of cultural traditions going back to ancient Greece, when bards and minstrels mastered the art of memorizing and recounting culturally significant tales. Stories by traveling minstrels established the common ground for interrelations between different nations and tribes. 

For many of us, the oral tradition seems an ancient, foreign thing. However, many of the aspects of the oral tradition are still operating in cultures today. In some ethnic and religious communities, members memorize passages or entire books of scripture. In some Native American cultures, elders and medicine men are still the keepers of history, expected to explain the meaning of ceremonies to youth as they come of age. Druids, Pythagoreans and other brotherhoods are also known to have uniquely employed the oral tradition.

Written Tradition

In 1475 AD, oral tradition changed to written tradition thanks to the printing press. This shift moved interpersonal exchange away from the in-person dimension of pre-Renaissance and ancient society. In ancient times there was an eyeball-to-eyeball quality of social interaction with very little mobility within the social structure. This immobility was maintained by natural constraints affecting time, labor, assets and distance. For example, copying books by hand was tiresome and complex, so the practice was confined to master craftsmen, making books and literacy rare. With the printing press, people could copy and distribute written laws and treatises, allowing for a new level of public scrutiny. As this new type of social accountability found its place, the role of the oral tradition in maintaining cultural order seems to have diminished.

The US Constitution can be considered the summit of the written tradition. This linchpin document was written in 1787, about 300 years after the Gutenberg press transformed knowledge and improved widespread literacy. The press and the Constitution seem to have increased the frequency of the iterative cycles of innovation and the breadth of scope for the next big shift to the visual tradition. 

Visual Tradition

The written tradition lasted about 400 years, from 1475 to 1900. The transition to the new visual tradition was spurred in part by the invention of the television, followed by the computer, internet, smartphone and most recently, augmented reality. The visual tradition has now held sway for 120 years. 

In 1985, Neil Postman identified the visual media as a new epistemology, stating, “print is now merely a residual epistemology and will remain so.” Today, we find society poised to use the internet as a personal-relations based model of information sharing for teaching, accessing the news, purchasing, entertaining and transacting business. I expect the visual tradition will become a primary procedural epistemology, used in both self and collective governance.

The two main differences making the internet more than just a very impressive digital printing press are the innovative uses of the database and the possibility of publishing change using experiential learning. With a book, we extend time by leveraging scrutiny out into the future for the populace. Now we can do even more, publishing a dynamic process that individuals and communities can customize to fit their circumstances and facilitate the process of change in a community.

The new visual tradition comes from the new capabilities of the internet, which has the raw ability to broadcast and transfer information instantaneously to the whole world. The way the internet is capable of personally transferring and sifting information has not received enough attention. The internet ought to serve the people by optimizing what happens in local, in-person interactions. It needs to increase the effectiveness of local dialogue, optimizing the time that we spend together with our communities. What we offer and receive using the tools of the visual tradition should include our best instructions and success stories regarding what we do when we are not using the internet. We should only spend 10-20% of our time accessing this information.The other 80-90% of our time should be off the internet, in-person, having prepared individually for an event, which though very personal, is an integral part of a larger process of growth and change.

Unfortunately, that is not how we currently engaging with the visual tradition. Instead, we spend the majority of our time glued to screens and devices. This dependence on the new visual media for entertainment and education is crushing the written tradition, making it more difficult for people to read and absorb long blocks of text. Too often we are only looking for headlines and soundbytes, losing the ideas and progress from previous generations and our own peers because we are unwilling to put in the time and effort to read them. 

We have also found ourselves spending so much time in online interactions that we are losing our ability to form meaningful relationships through face-to-face interactions. We call people friends then only process their lives in pictures and brief glimpses. 

The oral tradition of meaningful, in-person communication is suffering as we grow more comfortable with short emails and shorter text messages instead of phone calls and face-to-face visits. This communication style may seem easier and more convenient, but it is also driving wedges between us and de-stabilizing society.

The way to combat this destabilization is to re-engage the oral and written traditions, which are both being crushed by the weight of new visual media. At the same time, we must acknowledge the power of the new visual tradition to bring about wide-scale social change faster. As long as our priorities are in order, the oral and written traditions can be optimized by the vast capabilities of the new visual tradition to create change. As we learn to engage the new visual media, all three traditions will go up in their productive utility, and we hope to cut out waste in the process. 

One of the key ways we intend to optimize these traditions is by improving our engagement density and employing whole-person relationships. The catalysts and organizations outlined in coming chapters will work to accomplish this.

Next up—Chapter 3: 3D Learning and Personal Relations

Comments, questions, suggestions? Let us know on the post.

If you’re interested in joining the mastermind group or launch team for the John and Abigail Center or any of the partner organizations, contact us.