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 »

“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 »

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 »

One consideration within my larger discussion and interest of new media (NM) as a return to orality is that it requires a new literacy. Clearly, I do not believe that the advent of podcasting and comparable trends are returning us to a solely oral culture. You can’t unknow what you know. That is, we have come this far with technological advancements in communication  (Plato to papyrus to pencils to programming to projectors to processors to podcasts). Short of events following some apocalyptic future, we are not going to throw away all such communication technologies and go back to solely oral exchanges.

So, the direction I’m pushing this theory is that we, as a technological culture have this trend (or group of related trends) within NM that has brought about a new orality. Is it a “return”? It is, in the sense that it again places with us the ability to communicate orally/aurally in way that we’ve not relied upon in centuries. However, it includes communication methods that we’ve used daily throughout our transition from oral to literate culture, and includes new methods, as well. It is, perhaps, this merging of tradition and more recent technology, that make NM an entirely new concept. So, in that sense, NM is not a return as much as it is a largely new method of presentation and communication with similarities to oral cultural and aspects that can be traced from oral culture to literate to print to film to Web to NM. Read the rest of this entry »