contemplating digital orality

“Old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies” (14).

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press, 2008.

OVC as a Medium
As I’ve discussed in the passed, while my research on the online video conversation (OVC) focuses on students’ use of the communication tool Viddler in the classroom, the study and the topic have little to do with Viddler. It is merely a tool that offers certain features that are beneficial to the OVC; it does not create it. Even through the course of this research, various tools and technologies are beginning to offer such features as the ability to comment within the timeline of an online video. As Henry Jenkins states, “[H]istory teaches us that old media never die–and they don’t even necessarily fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content…” (13). Regardless of whether Viddler persists, the phenomenon that is the OVC is not dependent on it or any other tool; it refers more to a method and a medium through which we communicate. Read the rest of this entry »

“A drug of ambiguous power may heal or poison.”
- highly paraphrased Derrida

O’Donnell, J. J. (2000). Avatars of the word: From papyrus to cyberspace: Harvard University Press.

A point that O’Donnell raises early in this text is the public-vs-private setting of the pre-Gutenberg writer, who wrote, copied, and distributed his texts in hand-written manuscript form. “There was no divorce between private and public” (11). In this way, the writer was quite in the public, as opposed to the printed book one now buys off the shelf, which has no physical tie to the author; although penned by he or she, it has gone through an editor, and an elaborate printing-publishing-packaging-distribution process. With the arrival of printing, the idea of the “author” was born: one who sits alone, working through the manufacture of the text and then turning it over to a publisher. Read the rest of this entry »

McLuhan, M. (1968). The gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man: Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968.

This text, obviously enough by title, largely addresses the effect of the Gutenberg press on both oral and chirograph communication. There is much to this that will be of use to me as I get further into my studies and seek to add more historical foundation. However, of most relevance today is the book’s consideration of what occurs when a new technology is presented either from within or external to a culture.

Read the rest of this entry »

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1st MIT Press ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.

In this chapter, McLuhan begins by noting that movies, which for the purposes of this post only certain aspects refer also to video, merges the mechanical and the organic in a special way. On the base level, the idea of a camera (mechanical) recording something organic like the growth of a flower or the fluid movement of someone walking is such a merging. However, on a somewhat deeper level, film takes something that may not be organic and makes it seem so by presenting a sequential series of still images into a moving picture, such as making a chair walk across a room. Film also links technology with print in that they both generate fantasy in the viewer or reader. Read the rest of this entry »

I am aware that I’ve been getting many new readers to this blog over the past few weeks and months. Furthermore, I realize that someone embarking on this blog anew might be at least somewhat lost, as if opening a text to the middle page and beginning to read. I frequently reference the “OVC” and the “AOC” among other concepts that by now should be quite familiar to frequent visitors to my blog, but which are likely meaningless to those newer visitors. Therefore, in an effort to provide readers (familiar and new) with an overview of my study, I have added the Pre-proposal to this blog.

You can find this page under the Research menu as well as on the link to the right under “What’s this all about?” However, once I write the full proposal and it is approved, which should be around October this Fall, I will likely remove the pre-proposal (or archive it) and just post the full proposal.