contemplating digital orality

[Edited 11.15.2007] Digital Orality is a term I have applied to refer to the way we communicate now with technology using audio and video tools and methods. In many of my past blog posts and notes, I’ve used the acronym AVNM (Audio Visual New Media) to refer to new media, such as podcasting, vodcasting, blogcasting, Skype, Voip, etc. I have, however, a few issues with this term. First, it should really be “audio and/or visual,” since some of the tools and applications to which I apply this term use sometimes just one or sometimes both audio and visual media. Also, abbreviating audio visual as AV, makes me recall K-12 educational filmstrips (OK, maybe that one’s just me).

I will acknowledge that one could also extend this category to include written media, such as blogs, Instant Messenger (IM), and email, since they are still verbal communication (as opposed to non-verbal communication) and therefore are a form of orality. However, I do not support this application of the term, largely because placing these writing type of media and pod/vodcasting and other audio and visual media into one big group is to break with Ong’s perspective that they are two very different elements, tools, and forms of communication. [Thanks to John Walter for helping me work through this one].

Admittedly, I sort of tried to avoid the term, it seems a little to sexy, hip, and non-academic in some ways. However, it is accurate, it encompasses all of the communication methods I noted above, it follows Walter Ong’s discussions of our transmissions from primary oral cultures through each milestone to electronic orality, the point where Ong left us. I find this a necessary step and condition to establish, since it is really the essence of my larger research and dissertation focus.

In my post on 11.05.07, I wrote, “We are a writing, electronic, and digital culture. That is, we have writing, so orality is not going to replace writing. … However, what is important to examine is that communication can exist in this New Media (NM) in a form that is more oral than it is textual. “

This is not so radical, when we consider Read the rest of this entry »

My Sister wrote me today; actually, she just sent a link to the latest moveon.org petition. This one, which I do support, is to help prevent “the mother of all tax loopholes.” Basically, if you are in the highest income percentage, you pay virtually nothing in taxes. I signed the petition for congress to close this. Unfortunately, I do not think this one, above all other votes in vain, with have much sway on congress. The reasoning behind this emotion is that the masses, unbelievably, think they will each one day be in that bracket. Read the rest of this entry »

A student wrote me last night with some excellent information for the class. All ASU students and faculty (anyone with an ASUrite ID) can download a little client (Mac or PC) to his or her desktop and use a ton of free software, including the major Adobe design apps, Dreamweaver, FrontPage, and other things like virus protection, FTP, etc. Here is the link (apps.asu.edU). I really cannot believe I did not know about this.

So, here’s the call for a post: Read the rest of this entry »

“Written texts all have to be related somehow, … to the world of sound, … to yield their meanings.” “Reading a text means converting it to sound, aloud or in the imagination… Writing can never dispense with orality.” (Ong, 8).

“Oral expression can exist and mostly has existed without any writing at all, writing never without orality.” (Ong, 8).

Reading these lines in Ong’s “Orality and Literacy” I consider the ways Audio and Visual New Media (AVNM) –or what I’ve come to call digital orality– depend on writing. I am not necessarily looking at the way it they do use text, as much as the extent to which they need to do so. In other words, are there ways, if we so choose, to increase the amount of more oral/visual-based communication? Read the rest of this entry »