Yearly Archives: 2007
Digital Orality for the Illiterate or Sensory-Impaired (Part 2)
“In a literate culture verbatim memorization is commonly done from a text, to which the memorizer returns as often as necessary to perfect and test verbatim mastery.” (Orality and Literacy 57). This cumbersome memorization process is not necessary on the digital orality realm. The podcaster can use a script for verbatim recitation and an outline…
Digital Orality for the Illiterate or Sensory-Impaired
Another consideration for the potential application of digital orality is for those not currently able to read. Digital orality can be a great way for an illiterate person to communicate. That is, it seems theoretically possible to train one to use a basic recording application and microphone. While a truly and fully illiterate person would…
Agonistically Toned
Ong also discusses that a characteristic of orally-based thought and expression is that it is, what he deems, agonistically toned. Specifically, he discuses that in oral cultures, each narrative and other piece of information is with the knower. This is to say, there is little way to decipher any difference between the known and the…
Close to the Human Lifeworld
Another characteristic of primary orality that Ong discusses is that it is close to the human lifeworld. This is to say that since they have no real way to structure information that can stand on it’s own, somewhat separated from human experience, “… oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or…
Tertiary Orality … Continued
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…
Oral Genealogy is Ephemeral
“Narrators narrate what audiences call for or will tolerate. When the market for a printed book declines, the presses stop rolling but thousands of copies may remain. When the market for an oral genealogy disappears, so does the genealogy itself, utterly.” (66). This is certainly logical in consideration of the printed word. When the call…
Conservative and/or Traditionalist
“Oral societies must invest great energy in saying over and over again what has been learned arduously over the ages. This need establishes highly traditionalist or conservative set of mind that with good reason inhibits intellectual experimentation. … By storing knowledge outside the mind, writing and, even more, print downgrade the figures of the wise…
Redundancy … repeated … again.
Continuing the conversation regarding redundancy or repetition (from 11.21.07), this concept can be seen as a large difference in the digital orality and new media psyche, quite separate from the writing psyche. “Since redundancy characterizes oral thought and speech, it is in a profound sense more natural to thought and speech than is sparse linearity….
What’s on the Telly? – Navigation and Control of our Content
In a primarily oral culture, there is no way to record and recall a speech or oral performance. As Ong, Heim, and others have detailed, this is the reasoning for the structured, rhythmic nature of the oral epic. It was just not possible for the human mind to organize and remember a detailed, complex story…
Redundant or Copius – Backlooping
“Thought requires some sort of continuity. Writing establishes in the text a ‘line’ of continuity outside the mind. If distraction confuses or obliterates from the mind the context out of which emerges the material I am now reading, the context can be retrieved by glancing back over the text selectively. …. In oral discourse, the…