contemplating digital orality

Fernback, Jan. “Legends on the Net: An Examination of Computer-Mediated Communication as a Locus of Oral Culture.” New Media & Society 5 1 (2003): 29-45.

“The potential of the internet as an(sic) medium of orality is worth of scholarly reflection.” (pg. 30.).

This statement is unquestionably accurate. However, real-time textual chat modes–a medium the author selects as the data source for her scholarly reflection–do not constitute a form of orality. As I have argued a number of times, while such communication forms are highly conversational, they cannot be considered oral communication, since they are not oral. To claim such is to break with the structure that Walter Ong (who Fernback cites heavily in this article) put forth to explain the ways that orality and literacy interact and differ. I will acknowledge the root of her study, however, that the Internet is a place where cultural folklore can be passed on, a process that was traditionally transferred orally.

Fernback’s largely addresses the changes that can occur when a communication type traditionally delivered through one conversational mode is now remediated through a different communication mode. Read the rest of this entry »

Crowston, Kevin, and Marie Williams. “Reproduced and Emergent Genres of Communication on the World Wide Web.” Information Society 16 3 (2000): 201-15.

Given its attention to the definition and consideration of the communication genre, I am drawing on this article to help support my suggestion of the Online Video Conversation (OVC) as a new communication genre.

In this 2000 article, Crowston and Williams look to how genres are formed on the Web. They define communicative genre as “an accepted type of communication sharing common form, content, or purpose, such as an inquiry, letter, memo, or meeting.” (pg. 202). Read the rest of this entry »

Briggs, Lowell A., and G. Dale Wagner. “Factors of Distraction in a One-Way-Video, Two-Way-Audio Distance Learning Setting.” PAACE Journal of Lifelong Learning 6 (1997): 67-75.

Published in 1997, this one is pretty outdated, particularly considering that Briggs and Wagner are citing works that were relatively contemporary at the time, but precede their work by 10 or more years. That said, there are a number of excellent points made in this article that are either directly relevant or can at least be modified in such a way as to make them applicable to the topic of online video use in distance classrooms.

The authors studied Read the rest of this entry »

Benevenuto, Fabricio, et al. “Characterizing Video Responses in Social Networks.” - 0804.4865.

Benevenuto, et al., characterized over 3.4 million video and 400,000 video responses collected from YouTube over a 7-day period. Among other reasons they found their characterization interesting, they cite a sociological reason, “relating to social networking issues that influence the behavior of users interacting primarily with stream objects, instead of textual content traditionally available on the Web.” (pg. 1?)

This article is relevant to my research, since it is a study of online video and video responses. However, Read the rest of this entry »

Ah-Pine, J., et al. “Crossing Textual and Visual Content in Different Application Scenarios.” Multimedia Tools and Applications 42 1 (2009): 31-56.

This article is quite outside the scope of my research and is bordering on irrelevant to it. The article discusses two approaches to text-image information processing in the multimodal scenario. In doing so, the paper is rather thick with formulas and coding to create these methods by which multimodal documents can be automatically scanned and various types of information (text, image, video, audio, etc.) can be extracted and coded.

However, I draw on this article for a few points that the authors address about our current state of multimodality on the Web and about how we now think differently about the interaction of visual (image and video) and text.

Read the rest of this entry »