Shifting Cultural Touchstones?

It would be very interesting to us here at Exploding Beakers to try an unearth commentaries from those who lived through the last major media shift - that is people who were around for the shift from an oral culture to a print culture. Did they moan and groan about how "those kids today with their books just don't understand the workings of Druidic culture like they used to? Why can't anyone recite Homer anymore?" By the very nature of the shift in medium, comments of the champions of the old guard are very hard to find nowadays. How many of us would be able to "read" the impassioned defense of the BetaMAX format its users probably made and recorded- on BetaMAX?

There is a story here, from USAToday about the general disconnectedness teenagers exhibit from their cultural antecedents. As an aside, we are intrigued by the timing of this discovery, as we were shocked by one of the questions directed to OSCAR-winning actress Marie Cotillard, while on the red carpet. The (very) young American journalist asked Cotillard, who later that evening won Best Actress for her portrayl of famed French singer Edith Piaf, that (and we're paraphrasing) since she [Piaf] had died before you [Cotillard] were born, did you know anything about her before beginning the film? However, this is also the central issue raised by the author of the article - that American youth are starting to live more and more in a cultural vaccuum, where the only history they are exposed to is in school history curricula.

In light of some of our earlier posts about the shift we are currently experiencing away from print and towards visual mediums like television and the movies, it would interest us greatly to see how these same students would have fared on subjects that are equally represented in both print and visual cultures. Much has been written about what was gained and lost in the change from an oral to print culture (primarily by authors like Marshall McLuhan), but it remains to be seen how the current process will unfold.