Gutenberg and D.W. Griffith or Books and Movies: Language Learning and the Aesthetics of Multi-media
Frank L. Borchardt Duke University
Notes:
The community that has gone to so many “technologies and ...” conferences, and heard so many keynote addresses and after-dinner speeches has become, over time, like unto that other community which has heard all the same jokes again and again, the long-term imprisoned. You will remember the famous story in which this experience had caused the inmates to reduce their jokes to numbers. A new prisoner is baffled when someone cries out in the dining hall, “twenty-three!” and is greeted with peels of laughter, or “eighty-two!” and the assembly disintegrates in side-splitting hilarity. The newcomer tries himself, shouts out “forty-four”--to sounds of stony silence. Recovering from terminal embarrassment he asks what he did wrong, only to be told, “some people just don't know how to tell a joke.”