Scholarly Article #1

As Pinker says, "consciousness evolves in connection with technology, shaping one another" (21). Looking back to the 18th or 19th century, our language and culture was very different from today and that has a lot to do with the evolution in technology. The advances in technology affected our writing and the change in writing furthered and changed technology. It isn't an either/or situation, but rather a both/and situation.

Because our culture has a larger amount of data, our minds have to understand and accomplish complex and abstract tasks. This makes, as Pinker explains, the thought that our human thought is purely and exclusively internal misleading. Instead, our thoughts are also shown in the external processes; e.g., body language, communication, and writing. We have to think of it as a "continuous materiality."

With the influx of information and symbols, we are required to create a new set of tools to coincide with the explosion of information.

The hardest part about trying to explain human interaction and thought scientifically is that it isn't inherently quantifiable. Rhetoric is such an abstract discussion, but it is based on the scientific knowledge of cognitive thought processes. So I appreciate in this article when it states that this book is "an attempt to introduce a theory of materiality of writing/media and cognition that is consonant with our theories about idology and discourse" (25).

The externalization of cognition and thought is a radical change. But when we think about the language, speech, and gestures we use as external reactions and reiterations of symbols, it is much easier to relate to the cavemen in their dwellings and the symbols they carved into the walls. The only difference is that we have increased the amount of symbols and separated our cognitive thoughts into speech, gestures, and actions from our bodies.

I found this article very interesting because it attempted to explain the evolution and fundamental change in the human races consciousness as writing and technology has advanced simultaneously. It was definitely fascinating and I felt more related to the cavemen than ever before.