contemplating digital orality

Man communicates with his whole body, and yet the word is his primary medium. Communication, like knowledge itself, flowers in speech (1).

Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. The Terry Lectures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.

This work, published in 1967, reveals many of the origins of Ong’s more popular Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge, 2002. Here, he discusses the history of language and communication from purely oral cultures to the chirographic era to print, and on to the electronic era. He states that, in terms of communication media, cultures can be divided into three successive stages, which are essentially stages of verbalization:

1. Oral or oral-aural;
2. Script, which reaches critical breakthroughs with the invention first of the alphabet and then later of alphabetic movable type; and
3. Electronic.

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Levy, Pierre. Cyberculture. Electronic Mediations, V. 4. Minneapolis, Minn.; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001,

“Technology is responsible for neither our salvation nor our destruction. Always ambivalent, technologies project our emotions, intentions, and projects in to the material world. The instruments we have built provide us with power, but since we are collectively responsible, the decision on how to use them is in our hands“ (xv).

Cyberspace:
The new medium of communications that arose through the global interconnection of computers.

Cyberculture:
That set of technologies (material and intellectual), practices, attitudes, modes of thought, and values that developed along with the growth of cyberspace.”

While this US edition was published in 2001, this work was originally published in 1997 (in French). However, many of Levy’s theories seem to have substantial staying power in our current age. Read the rest of this entry »

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.