What I don't understand is how someone who holds non-written methods of transmission in such contempt can wind up on a folk music forum.

I learned the lullabys I sing to my kid from my mother, father, and uncle, they didn't write them out on manuscript paper or make me learn the key signature. They just sang them to me. If you're going to say that's not real music, or not real culture, then you're just making an idiot of yourself.

I look through the list of songs I sing (I almost always sing unaccompanied) and the majority of them are songs that I've learned from hearing them.

And before anybody takes this as a sign of musical illiteracy, I've studied piano for many years, I am very glad I can read the notes Byrd or Beethoven or Bartok put on the page, and was educated as a Cathedral chorister, learning to read both gregorian chant and modern notation, singing mass and three evensongs a week for 3 years. So I understand written transmisison perfectly well.

It's just respect and understand non-written transmission. And I know that there are aspects of music that you'll never get just by looking at blobs on a page. The aspects that I learned hearing songs sung to me by my parents, or, for that matter, by singers in a pub.

If you think that's somehow damaging culture because nobody bothered to look down to check what was on the page, then I feel very sorry for you.