The notion that everyone (who matters) now has the equivalent of a printing press is an interesting part of the scriptocentric worldview.

What people tend to forget is that having others read to you is also a form of power. Sure, there are movies about the problems with this scenario. But our perception that scribes are the one with agency is at the very core of scriptocentism.

It’s been obvious in my teaching that a lot of people confuse -centrisms with pride or condescension. Yet it’s possible to be selfcentred and ashamed, or eurocentric and guilt-stricken. My favourite approach to explaining these -centrisms comes from a textbook which defines tempocentrism thusly:

Treating one's historical time period as "normal," or best, or as timeless; failing to conceive how the past or future might differ from the present.

Despite the mention of “best”, the key idea is quite different from comparative judgment. It’s about a failure of the imagination.

The statement which triggered my whole reaction. But the attitude is very common, just rarely so explicit and never discussed.

Screencast version of my voice annotations on the whole text, its context, and further thoughts on scriptocentrism. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x41n4wr

There was some discussion of this, especially those moving away from the emphasis on text.

With “text”, here, in the broadest sense. Which some people outside the Humanities may not find so obvious. “A drawing is a text?” Well, yes, in this sense.

Does Seymour Papert still argue against the 3Rs? There’s reason to dig deeper instead of jumping to conclusions. But it’s clear that “access to hi-tech devices” is hyped.