In a December 2009 article “Listening to Braille,” Rachel Aviv discusses the decline of Braille users in developed countries, stating that with technology that allows textual information to be presented in audio formats, the generally expensive and sometimes difficult to attain printed Braille texts are being employed less and less by many blind individuals. This has led, notes Aviv, to developmental cognitive differences between those who learn to use Braille and those who do not, indicated in at least one growing trend among audio-learners among the blind community who demonstrate difficulty in constructing linear narratives. Aviv further indicates that among the blind community there exists a growing cultural divide among those who advocate mainstream integration promoted through listening to audio-text and those who assert that “listening is not literacy.”
I wonder, however, if there isn’t a greater cultural paradigm being challenged here—that of the elitism of literacy. There is a certain fetishization of the written word. Literacy is granted a mark of elitism and education, and it is perceived and touted in developed nations as being key to intelligence. But this is not really true. First, literacy has no bearing on intelligence, on the capacity to think, though it must be acknowledged that learning to read and write trains the brain to develop in certain way. Literacy is not the gateway to intelligence, but only a gateway to a kind of intelligence, and, it just so happens, the kind of intelligence that is considered valuable in modernity. We mark our leaders today by their strength in the kind of intelligence marked by literacy; the age of the Ring-Giver and warrior king who need not be literate is long over. Second, literacy gives means to the recording and transmission of detailed and specific information of sundry types and significances. Literacy also grants continued and ever expanding access to this recorded information. There is legacy attached to this method of information transmission, and untold numbers of texts stretching thousands of years into human history that cannot be accessed except in textual form. No film version, no youtube video, no audio recordings. Even putting aside for a moment the understanding that for much of what remains of past culture’s writings requires specialized knowledge to interpret and looking only and English produced texts, there exists hundreds of years of text accessible to one literate in the English language. This legacy is further specialized by knowing that for centuries, only the elite of society generally had access to the education required to become fully literate. This means that for the bulk of human history, the majority of functioning society in the West was illiterate, and yet, as oral literature (e.g. folk and fairy tales) tells us, narrative did not die out among those who could not read or write.
So what about the breakdown of narrative by those students who are blind but do not learn to read Braille, instead learning through listening? I would argue that we need to evaluate the parameters of these studies, and we need to understand where the range falls not only between blind non-Braille learners and blind Braille learners, but also between sighted students who read and participate more frequently in short (like magazine articles and blog entries), hypertext (the interconnection of hyperlinked sources on the web), or “chunked” (broken into multiple pieces, like a television show with segments and episodes, or a blog with a series of short entries) or nonlinear media and those who still participate more in longer (films and novels), traditionally contained (containing no hyperlinks), and linear structures. Finally, as to the question of narrative, what is being done to pass narrative structure through the oral tradition? This is a dying art. Oh, it can be found, sometimes, languishing, for example, among professional and armature storytellers (a scant population in the West). But truth might simply be that the fetishism attached to the written word, to literacy, has diminished the teaching of linear thought and narrative through other forms, and in the forms where narrative does flourish (film, for example), much of the narrative is told through non-verbal images.
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