contemplating digital orality

In this post, I return to the conversation about whether digital orality is part of the secondary orality or can be considered a tertiary orality (see post on 11.12.07) and whether there is anything in the current age and level of orality that can be seen as a return to orality (see entire section on return to orality). Basically, new media and digital orality is not a return to orality, at least not primary orality, because we cannot at this point let go our reliance on, awareness of, recalling of words… even if we wanted to, which I doubt would ever occur. On page 3, Ong states, “The electronic age is the age of secondary orality.” So, what is our age now, how is it different from the electronic age, and is it logical to apply a new level (tertiary)? 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 »

“Computer literate” is obviously not a new term or concept; we hear it often to refer to one’s general ability to understand and use a computer. I suggest it applies to the general ability to use a mouse/keyboard, perhaps to navigate the Internet, or to create a basic Word doc with bold headings and numbered lists. However, given the importance that computers have in our professional and personal lives, the term is really too general and broad for any real application. Without any direct context, a reader or audience of the term cannot fully know the concept to which the statement is referring. Read the rest of this entry »

I have little to say on this point. Rather, I was hoping that others might opine on this. It seems that there are increasingly ways in which to communicate/interact with the computer. This topic does have obvious hints at my interest in orality. I could see successful communication with a decent microphone/software set-up and a mouse as not too far off. However, there are also virtual interfaces already, as well: those screens that can be projected a foot in front of the user’s face. Admittedly, I know very little about such technology, but I do hear people discussing this in regard to a desire to transcend the QWERTY (or other) keyboard.

In Chapter Two, “The Theory of Transformative Technologies,” in Michael Heim’s Electric Language, he discusses Walter Ong and Eric Havelock and their (separate) studies of orality. The background for my next point is essentially his discussion of the reason for epic poems and sagas of oral cultures being not for poetic purposes as we generally think them to be. That is, they were not for any aesthetic purposes, but rather, they were tales constructed in very structured, rhythmic style for the purpose of memory. Because oral (preliterate) cultures preceded writing and, of course print, speakers came up with various methods, such as these to enhance both understanding and retention of anything that was to be remembered. To help one remember something that was taught, he or she (mostly “he” in ancient Greece) repeated the speech, sometimes many times.

I agree with this point and will soon expand on it, bringing in other examples, such as the passing on of the Koran for many years before it was finally written. However, it was a different point of Heim’s that sparked today’s entry. In discussing the transformation of oral to written culture (and Ong’s theory of the chirographic culture), Heim writes:

Memory, the storehouse of knowledge, no longer depends on repeated vocal performances. Manual writing preserves knowledge beyond ephemeral speech and beyond the lapse in memory. In chirographic cultures, the performance of language by a speaker is no longer essential. (Heim pg. 62).

In some ways, this citation refers to instruction, and the relationship of teacher to learner, not just speaker to listener, in that in oral culture, one reason to repeat a speech so many times was to pass it on and, as Heim notes, writing it it down preserves knowledge in tht it can be more easily and accurately (presumably) passed on. However, I immediately thought that his statement is not wholly true - that the speaker is no longer essential if all text can be put into a book. What of the classroom? Read the rest of this entry »