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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Every generation writes this about the subsequence going back to ancient Greece. There's never any truth to it.[/quote]

Yes there is. When they worried in ancient Greece that writing would lead to people no longer memorizing the entire Illiad, they weren't wrong about that. I doubt there's been a human being alive in centuries, maybe even millenia, who has memorized the Illiad, but the Greeks used to do it. What the ancient Greeks could not have forseen was the positive benefits of writing for other things would (I think) outweigh the loss of that much memorization.

Will social media culture have benefits that are equivalent to writing? It...sure doesn't seem like it.[/quote]

People definitely still memorize the Iliad[/quote]

Find me someone who has memorized the entire thing - I'd love to know.[/quote]

NP. There was a guy in the 90s, Stephen Powelson, who I think eventually had it all entirely memorized and would do it as a performance. Having large chunks memorized is not uncommon, I knew a couple professors in college who could do a book or so. There's a guy who much of the Christian Bible memorized, Tom Meyer, and memorization of the Quran is relatively common (the Quran is shorter, but they're in the same ballpark). Memorization of that amount of material is possible, you just have to value it enough to take the time and

The thing about ancient oral tradition that gave us the Iliad, though, is that it probably wasn't exactly memorized (this a theory, but it's generally accepted by scholars). It was orally [i]composed [/i], effectively improvised, using the outlines of the story and formulaic phrases that made that possible. I don't think that survived really anywhere after literacy was common. The pioneers in this theory, Milman Parry and Albert Lord worked in Yugoslavia which had an active tradition of this kind of oral storytelling into the 20th century, but among people who I believe were largely illiterate. [/quote]

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