Although one might imagine that one would have to travel to a very remote place to observe evidence of the differences between the use of speech in an ear culture and an eye culture, this is not necessarily true.

Schafer’s starting point was to note the incredible dominance of the visual modality in society — "eye culture," as it has been termed else-where — and to reveal that children’s ability to listen was, in his experience, deteriorating.

In a 1980 essay on Elias Canetti, Sontag distinguished between "ear culture" and "eye culture" — Hebrew versus Greek, as she put it, moral versus aesthetic. "The ear," she wrote, "is the attentive sense, humbler, more passive, more immediate, less discriminating than the eye which . . . affirms the pleasures and the wisdom of . . . surfaces."