Media Making Part 1

Oral culture has always been fascinating to me. Dr. Murray asked us in my Fairy Tales in Literature and Film class could we ever possibly trace back to the original story teller of a classic tale. No. It’s like the chicken and the egg when you think about discovering the origins of a story. Written fairy tales came from oral ones. Now, the Grimms recorded tales but altered them adding layers of medieval, religion, and Nordic references. Everything past down and did not come from sole Germans but the Norse, the French, and the Celts. The Grimms did not want to be associated with the French and Italians. It wanted to be purely German. Writers can educate in a way that oral culture cannot compete. When people are literate and attend school, they read history and loose the oral tales of their grandparents. We know for example that Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492 and with him brought “civilization”. Writing about this event can be very formal and just show statistics of how many people lost their lives to illness or cruelty. We lose the oral tale that removes the pain the people endured or how their lives were forever changed. Families destroyed. We only get one side of the story. Today, we can get our information from a variety of sources but if so much of the news in controlled by a few interest groups, how does the variety of means matter if they are basically identical. This picture shows a number of media outlets but after viewing documentaries in Visual Communication, I understand that they are owned by a handful of companies.
http://www.tv-streams.info/channels1.jpg