| November 17, 1999 | 03 00050 61 99111701 |
Mr. Ross H. Armstrong
Manager
armstror@us.ibm.com
U.S. Sales Development
IBM Global Financing
| Subject: | Prometheus, Thucydides, Gutenberg |
Dear Ross,
Thanks for the letter on November 8. Glad to hear of your work with Hutch developing writing skills. If time permits, he might submit his paper on Prometheus for comment. I am curious if he developed the relation to Pandora? That would have current application.
An angle for a future paper might be why people 3,000 years or so ago, who did not have television, books, or the Internet, spent time conjuring up characters who differed so markedly from their daily lives. One analyst of the ancient Greek historian, Thucydides, maintains that exaggeration is endemic, indeed essential, to oral communication, which was the norm when Greek mythology arose. The reasoning for that theory, and awareness about other aspects of human speech practices, have important implications today.
The tension between orality and lituracy in the work place seems certain to increase, as a result of continued technological progress begun by Gutenberg, which Drucker calls the foundation of a Knowledge Revolution in a recent article.
Keep me posted on the wearable PC. Maybe Lou will pull into a meeting someday, flip the switch and say Fill'er up! The mind reels.
Tell Hutch thanks from me for his selection of classical Greek liturature to submit a paper. It led to interesting research. Maybe it can help on his next assignment.
Sincerely,
Rod
Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net