November 19th, 2007
Another aspect of digital orality style takes into consideration how meaning is established and to what extent grammar and syntax play into that.
“Chirographic structures look more to syntactics (organization of the discourse itself)…. Written discourse develops more elaborate and fixed grammar than oral discourse does because to provide meaning it is more dependant upon linguistic structure, since it lacks the normal full existential contexts which surround oral discourse and help determine meaning in oral discourse somewhat independently of grammar.” (Orality and Literacy. 38).
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November 17th, 2007
Writing was initially affected by orality. That is, it was formulaic and worked to convey the story or message through such formulas as rhythm, repetition, structured organization, etc. This is a sort of residual orality that manifested in the literary style. Eventually, writing became more flowing prose and literature as we realized the freedom of writing since it enhanced (killed?) memory. By this I mean it was no longer necessary to organize content in such an structured, formulaic manner for the sake of recalling it. Then, we became oral again with the advent of TV, radio, electronic orality, etc. Read the rest of this entry »
November 16th, 2007
“Without writing, words have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. …. [S]ound has a special relationship to time, unlike that of other fields registered by human sensation. Sound exists only when it is going out of existence.” (Orality and Literacy, 31-2).
Unlike a moving picture, which can be stopped on a single frame, one cannot stop sound and have sound. In most situations, pausing a moment in an audio recording produces silence, not in indefinitely sustained note. However, one could stop on a single note of music or a single syllable of speech, and extend that one moment of sound indefinitely. Read the rest of this entry »