Print Culture - Text and Print

Text and Print

There is a common miscommunication that occurs when discussing that which is print and that which is text. In the literary world, notable scholars such as Walter Ong and D.F. McKenzie have disagreed on the meaning of text. The point of the discussion at hand is to have a word that encompasses all forms of communication - that which is printed, that which is online media, even a building or notches on a stick. According to Walter Ong text did not come about until the development of the first alphabet, well after humanity existed. According to Mckenzie primitive humans did have a form of text they used to communicate with their cave drawings. This is discussed in literary theory. Print, however, is a representation of what which is printed, and does not encompass all forms of communication (e.g. a riot at a football game).

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Famous quotes containing the words text and, text and/or print:

    What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one’s meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
    Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)

    And so on into winter
    Till even I have ceased
    To come as a foot printer,
    And only some slight beast
    So mousy or so foxy
    Shall print there as my proxy.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)