The Lecture as Testimony: In a Technological Age

Abstract

The question of this essay, shaped by a changing historical moment of a digital age, examines the old as garnering renewed importance. The text is old wine ever vital and now rediscovered in new wine skins of a digital age. This essay invites a creative opening for a historically important standpoint: the necessity of the understanding the rhetorical importance of the lecture as testimony in an era of technological change. The digital world in this case permits the old to find new energy and purpose in a changing rhetorical environment where the constant of text (that which matters) propels both a traditional and an ever-changing technological world. In a digital world of blurred issues of time, space, and speaker/audience, one must ask a basic question: Is there a rhetorical rationale for reliance on the lecture in a digital and information age? I contend that the connecting link between the lecture as a traditional form of rhetoric and digital modalities is the notion of text.

Marshall McLuhan (1993) considered the lecture a “hot medium,” which suggests that it excludes and denies participation. He advocated forms of education that include and invite active engagement, “cool media.” He wanted education to forego telling and invoke participatory discernment. “McLuhan advocated discovery learning, whereby students would find things out for themselves by working collaboratively on topics that interested them” (Kuskis, 2011, p. 319). The demand for a cool medium that invokes high participation made the lecture a prime enemy. The traditional assumption about the lecture is that it invites passive learning through mere knowledge transfer. In 1967, McLuhan contended that the lecture was finished. His criticism is not without numerous supporters. A simple search for the death of the lecture renders 31,000 titles since McLuhan’s announcement. However, the death of the lecture in reality aligns with the famous quote from Mark Twain, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated” (quoted from Messent, 2007, p. 22). The exaggeration for Twain was two-fold: he was not dead and he did not offer the quote attributed to him (Messent, 2007). Concurrently, I contend that the lecture is not dead and repetitive predictions about its demise exaggerate reality. In a media age, the lecture acts as a testimony accessible to a much larger world.