Tag Archives: orality
Electric Rhetoric – Technologies of Electric Rhetoric
The Sophistic performance of electronic rhetoric has arrived. …It is on computers. … and it is on television. (137) Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy. The MIT Press, 1999. In this fifth Chapter of Electric Rhetoric, Technologies of Electric Rhetoric, Welch elaborates on her idea of an electric rhetoric–stemming…
Presence of the Word – Word as Sound
[C]ultures which do not reduce words to space but know them only as oral-aural phenomena, in actuality or in the imagination, naturally regard words as more powerful than do literate cultures” (112). Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. The Terry Lectures. New Haven: Yale University Press,…
Presence of the Word – Plato’s Take
Spoken words are events, engaged in time and indeed in the present. Plato’s ideas were the polar opposite: not events at all, but motionless “objective” existence, impersonal, and out of time. (34). Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. The Terry Lectures. New Haven: Yale University Press,…
Presence of the Word – Back to Oral (Not)
Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. The Terry Lectures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. As I’ve noted many times through this blog, I am not suggesting through my focus on this unique form of aural/visual communication that we are on some track to return to…
Presence of the Word – Electronic Era
Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. The Terry Lectures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. Ong discusses the third stage of verbalization and notes that the process is sequential: The past century has seen the world enter into a new stage beyond orality and script and…
Presence of the Word
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…
Cyberculture
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…
Legends on the Net: An Examination of Computer-Mediated Communication as a Locus of Oral Culture
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…
Must New Media Depend on Writing?
“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…
When will the keyboard go away?
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…