COMN 1000 Lecture Notes - Rationality, Iroquois

• School: York University
• Department: Communication Studies
• Course: COMN 1000
• Professor: Rob Heynen

Document Summary

Oral cultures, literate cultures (writing and print), electronic cultures: there are period of time where particular types of communication were dominant in a society, overlapping forms of communications. Oral cultures: key characteristics include: face-to-face, memory, performance, time, scale. Good memories, because you have to remember everything and everyone and every place you visit, etc. Performance is key into passing on things from one person to the other. Performing stories, dances, music, sharing ideas, knowledge. A newspaper is the same no matter who reads it, but a story is different based on who it is told by. Storytelling cultures have an important performance element: religious or other leaders often, said to be conservative because stories are protected. Weird relationships between odd things that don"t seem to matter. No written records, no direct statements (written things) to refer to. Lots of societies developed primarily from oral cultures. Confederation of 6 nations (including mohawk and others) Highly developed constitutional system and political organization.