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perpetuated by the computer culture. Anything can be done from the privacy of one’s own home, office, or bedroom. People are meeting, talking, and exchanging ideas (and much more) without ever meeting or talking.

Oral culture also flourishes in the computer culture. If oral culture is everything not literate culture, then it is a great deal of things in the computer culture: again, images, sound bites, and Flash animation technologies are only a few of the ever-evolving non-written mediums available through the computer culture. And if oral culture is something more specific than simply “everything not literate culture,” it is still at home in the computer culture. With real time audio broadcasts from around the world and the availability of different voices, music, and language via the Internet, oral culture is in some ways being kept alive on the Internet.

In Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism, she uses theoretical language to explain an idea that Tim O’Brien puts into practice in his novel, The Things They Carried. She writes about the “confrontation that [she calls] postmodernist: where documentary historical actuality meets formalist self-reflexivity and parody…an exploration of the way in which narratives and images structure how we see ourselves and how we construct our notions of self, in the present and in the past” (7). An important postmodern issue focuses on the ways in which people understand both their lives and their histories. Hutcheon asserts that people tend to use narratives and images—stories and mental pictures—to comprehend both historical events and modern, day-to-day life. In other words, the best way for people to create vivid, coherent understandings of any given event is by inventing a story or picture. It is through these stories, images, works of art, that people can most easily relate to an abstract or historical concept.

Hutcheon’s ideas are a small piece of my Honors thesis. These concepts are relevant to this essay because of their incorporation of everything into one compact notion: understanding. Every culture has sought to understand its existence—its past, present, and future—in whatever means available. In an oral culture, understanding is reached through performance, storytelling, and the collective passing down of history and ideas to preserve memory. In a literate culture, this same understanding is reached on a more individual level; each experience of “passing down” is private and personally interpreted for each reader. In some ways, understanding becomes more subjective as a result of its isolation. And finally, in a computer culture these two are combined. Understanding is reached collectively through navigation of the Internet (everyone sees the same pages/pictures/words; it is an experience of the performance of the Web). At the same time, each person interprets each page, image, and sound bite into a private world in the home or office.

The existence of a computer culture somewhat neatly encapsulates life, literature, and Information Society. Here we all are, with new technologies arriving in our lives everyday, and everything we do, say, want, or need can be, in some form or manifestation, accessed via computer and Internet. This is not necessarily a good thing. While technology brings many new freedoms and luxuries into everyday life, it also disallows freedoms such as self-sufficiency and indep