McLuhan and Postman on New Media Criticism
McLuhan, Marshall. 2003 (orig. 1962 & 1964). “Two Selections by Marshall McLuhan.” In The New Media Reader. Cambridge: MIT Press. Postman, Neil. 1992. “Invisible Technologies.” Technopoly. New York: Vintage Books. After reading these noted articles, I had the following two questions posed:
Ong and Heim on Digital Literacy & Transformation Theory
Heim, Michael. 1999 (orig. 1987). “The Theory of Transformative Technologies.” Electric Language, 2nd edition. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ong, Walter. 1982. “Some Theorems.” Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge. Here are a couple articles/chapters and the questions I was asked related to them:
Foucault and Feenberg on Truth and Technology
A few weeks ago, I read the following pieces from Feenberg and Foucault. Feenberg, Andrew. 2002. “The Critical Theory of Technology.” Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Truth and Power” & “What Is an Author?” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books. Following this reading,…
Derrida – On the Demise of Language Through Writing (Part 2)
Last week, I had three questions posed on recent readings of Derrida. Here are the questions and my responses. While Birkerts lays out a clear demarcation between electronic and print writing, Derrida writes in the pre-Internet era. If you were to hypothesize how Derrida would treat the relationship between print and electronic “text,” what would…
Derrida – On the Demise of Language Through Writing
Birkerts, Sven. 1994. “Into the Electronic Millennium.” & “Hypertext of Mouse and Man.” The Gutenberg Elegies. New York: Ballentine Books. URL: http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bdbirk.htm Derrida, Jacques. 1976. “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing.” Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP. While the Derrida peice was mighty dense, it was manageable; and both works…
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…