WORLD OF LEARNING: IS LISTENING LEARNING?

"Listening to Braille" The New York Times 12/30/09

More about the benefits and drawbacks of audio, as in, "Can you be literate if your only access to literature is audial?" It's a subject I've started getting obsessive about, as indicated previously in WORLD OF LEARNING: LISTENING IS LEARNING and RECENT NEWS: THE CASE FOR LISTENING.

On one side of the debate in the Times story, "the literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate societies think differently than members of oral societies." And the National Federation of the Blind whose "mantra, 'listening is not literacy'" is "repeated everywhere" at their convention. On the other, the blind "managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm" who feels that Braille is "an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should be abolished." And the governor of New York, who "dictates his memos" and has "pertinent newspaper articles...read...aloud on his voice mail every morning." Are they illiterate?