All posts by timebarrow
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…
The Syntactic Style of Digital Orality
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…
The Style of Digital Orality
This is sort of a continuation of yesterday’s discussion on residual styles following the transition from oral to literary and then on to (not back to) a new orality. When considering the ways in which we organize our speeches, podcasts, etc., are there identifiable styles and inspirations? There are various types of podcasts, so there…
Residually Cyclical Styles
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…
Indefinite Sound
“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…
Memory and Digital Orality
“Fortunately, literacy, though it consumes its own oral antecedents and, unless it is carefully monitored, even destroys their memory, is also infinitely adaptable. It can restore their memory, too. Literacy can be used to reconstruct for ourselves, the pristine human consciousness which was not literate at all.” (Orality and Literacy. 15). This is the continuation…