Pratoomsri
1
Teerawat Pratoomsri
Dr. L. Casmier-Paz
ENC 1101H
2 December 2007
Silver Screens and the Internet: Blackboards of the Postliterate Age
Writing is the very foundation of our history. Without writing, we would not be what we are
today. Everything we do or have today ultimately leads back to writing, be it our technology, our
organization, or our very ways of life. In the past decades, though, technology and innovations in
media such as films and the Internet have rendered conventional writing essentially obsolete, even
though both films and the Internet could also be considered writing, though unconventional.
Before the “Postliterate Age” (Rosenstone 50), writing dictated the majority of our understanding
of native peoples, their history, and the earliest encounters between Europeans and Native
Americans, both positively and negatively.
Some of our understandings of the natives and their encounters are positive. In the Aztec
accounts of the reading
First Encounters
, the Aztecs were shown as peaceful and loyal people by
showing that the Aztecs “[one] by one did reverence to Cort
é
s by touching the ground before him
with their lips” and “arrayed the captain in the finery they had brought him as presents” (Leon-
Portilla 16), although the Europeans paid them back in blood. In parts of
Black Robe
, the natives
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Pratoomsri
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are shown as courageous, caring, and spiritual. These descriptions give us a good impression and

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- Fall '07
- Casmier-Paz
- Aztec, black robe, Fernando Cortés
-
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