英语论文网

随着电脑的普及，由这一事物衍生出来的文化成为“计算机文化“。所谓计算机文化，就是人类社会的生存方式因使用计算机而发生根本性变化而产生的一种崭新文化形态。涵盖影响计算和日常生活的重要技术趋势，对数据安全、个人隐私、在线安全、数字版权管理、开源软件和便携式应用程序、上网本的流行以及mac计算机的热卖进行了广泛讨论。

本文作者讲述了大学课程选择过程中选择的计算机文化以及随着课程学习对这门课程的认识及同学时间的讨论等。计算机文化是一门一门重要的计算机公共基础课程。课程以“立足基础、适当延伸，重在应用、强化能力，服务专业、适应社会”为理念，通过典型学习型工作任务、学习情境的设置和基于所对接专业的差异化设计，达到提升学生计算机文化素养和应用能力的目的，为后续专业课学习与职业发展奠定坚实的基础。

I registered for this capstone course simply because its description in the English Department course guide intrigued me. I never imagined that the central issues of the course would intersect so often and so dynamically with the postmodern ideas of truth and representation in which I was already immersed.

I first articulated (for myself) the differences between oral and literate culture in a post to our class listserv on November 15, 2001. The major difference between oral and literate cultures is the primacy of the word itself. In oral culture, the words are everything; they are performance, they are meaning, and they are central to all understanding and memory. In literate culture, the words have been once removed by the representation of written language; they are now letters on a page. The sounds and actions are lost and the interpretation of language becomes more private and individual. Instead of being experienced, as in oral culture, words are simply absorbed in literate culture.

These ideas are further illustrated by referring to Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. An obvious focal point of the book, and the idea that my first summary for this class explored, is the notion that the title implies: we live by certain dominant metaphors. This is a function of oral culture despite the fact that we live in a predominantly literate culture. After certain metaphors become commonplace to speak in and with, they begin to transcend speech; they enter thought processes and allow people to not only speak, but also think, in the dominant metaphorical concepts of the culture.

The concept love, for example, is structured mostly in metaphorical terms: love is a journey, love is a patient, love is a physical force, love is madness, love is war, etc. The concept of love has a core that is minimally structured by the subcategorization love is an emotion and by links to other emotions, e.g., liking. This is typical of emotional concepts, which are not clearly delineated in our experience in any direct fashion and therefore must be comprehended primarily indirectly, via metaphor. (85)

This excerpt from Metaphors We Live By aptly supports the idea that people think in terms of metaphor, and thereby experience metaphor in the structures of oral culture as much as (if not more than) literate culture. At the same time, this excerpt throws a wrench into my argument.

Fortunately, I embrace this wrench and everything it entails. To re-quote the passage, emotional concepts “are not clearly delineated in our experience in any direct fashion and therefore must be comprehended primarily indirectly, via metaphor” (85). Lakoff and Johnson typify metaphor as “indirect” and consequently imply a representation. Metaphor represents some otherwise unquantifiable (unable to be worded) experience. Does this make metaphor as good as written lan