Place your thoughts on the Ong reading below. Try to keep them focused on a single issue the text raises with which you would like to engage more during class.
Update: To avoid any confusion this is the book you should have for two weeks from now. The title is The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe ISBN 978-0-521-60774-2. (384 pages.)
Ong says, “We – readers of books such as this – are so literate that it is very difficult for us to conceive of an oral universe of communication or thought except as a variant of a literate universe” (2). But he seems to give us a little too much literacy credit and not enough orality credit. Yes, our society is one that values the ability to read and write, but we don’t use those exclusively in our communications. We still discuss matters, attend lectures and listen to poems or songs aloud. Is it possible that, rather than a completely literate culture that has lost touch with all oral roots, we are more of a hybrid culture?
If “…a literate person cannot fully recover a sense of what the word is to purely oral people” (12), can decreasing literacy return that sense to a once literate culture? We are not to the point of complete illiteracy yet, but given the numbers of people who “fall through the cracks” of failing education systems, we are not a totally literate culture. Yet the semi-literate or completely illiterate among us are somehow able to function in our society. Based on Ong’s description that primary oral cultures are cultures that have no knowledge of writing, our barely literate and hardly educated must fall on the literate society side of the split. Even those who can’t read beyond a fifth grade level have some knowledge of writing, right?
Ong describes people’s descriptions of their lives in oral cultures as difficulty in articulate self-analysis. But this is more a hierarchy of needs issue. These farmers want more land to grow more wheat to make more bread, etc. Without fulfilling the basic needs, humans can’t climb up the hierarchy to more enlightened thought processes. This is not a literacy issue, it’s a human issue – one that we face right here in our “literate society.” Yes, we have a highly literate section of our culture, but we incorporate oral attributes in our communication (just try and get any professor to give the same lecture verbatim twice). We are in our “second orality,” as Ong says. We have illiterate or barely literate sections of our population yet we are able to function as a literate society. If we had lost all connection to our oral culture, as Ong seems to think we have because we can read his book, these people would not be able to function in our society. Unless, or course, we are hybrid.
ALSO:
If anyone is interested: The Millman Parry collection (from pg. 59) is online at http://chs119.harvard.edu/mpc/
In many ways, our present digital culture, complete with wireless internet and mobile communication devices galore (in which context Ong is not writing), shares more similarities with oral culture than with print culture. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, oral and digital cultures are alike because they are not physical texts which take up space. Ong writes that “Print embedded the word in space more definitely” (121). Secondly, Ong notes that print culture aims to canonize the written word and to ensure that the book’s contents are not only correct but complete: “The printed text is supposed to represent the words of an author in definitive or ‘final’ form” (130). While digital publications cannot be revised as easily as oral discourse (one needs only to explain something differently or rephrase a thought), they can be and are updated/expanded at frequent intervals. So, “to publish” a digital text only means to record the text’s most recent update. In oral and digital culture, there is not that need for “closure” (130) that Ong identifies in print culture. Thirdly, there is no agreed-upon system of organization of information in oral and print cultures. While books have indexes, pagination, and tables of contents, one cannot really rely on such consistent retrieval systems online, and certainly not orally. Early literates (13th century) viewed the index as a curiosity and a thing of “mystery and beauty” (Ong 122).
Fourthly, and as my last point of comparison, in print culture there can be no conversation since “written discourse has been detached from its author” (Ong 77) and “a written text is basically unresponsive” (78). First the composer is alone with the text, and then the audience member is alone with the text. Of course, we know this is untrue in an oral culture, but I also believe it is untrue in a digital culture. In the “networked alternative space” (Smart Mobs 5) of the internet (to use Howard Rheingold’s phrase), we read news articles followed by discussion boards, essays with links to contact the author, and web-based course materials that correct our answers and provide explanations. Indeed, digital culture is interactive. I highlight one primary difference in digital culture, however: the physical encounter is missing, and no webcam or futuristic hologram can act as a substitute. Interactive does not equal interpersonal. I believe this is the most important difference between oral and digital culture. In this respect, print culture is more like oral culture than digital culture. Without the aid of technology, one takes handwritten notes in the book’s margins or in a notebook, and then discusses the book in a physical group, aided by the facial expressions, real-time analyses, and real-life personalities of peers. This is lost in reading eBooks and participating in online discussion forums. And I do believe there is something lost, when we cannot (or simply choose not to) hold the printed work in our hands and orally discuss it amongst ourselves.
On this track, I wonder: Will digital technology ultimately contribute to increased socialization amongst Americans, or will it work as a wedge between Americans, rendering interpersonal, face-to-face communication useless and dated? While social networking sites, text messages, email, and cell phone plans with unlimited nationwide calling seemingly help and encourage Americans to keep in touch, I wonder if these technologies are really encouraging Americans to get lazy about their social lives. (e.g. break-ups via text message.) Also, mobile communication devices have made possible the ubiquitous office space of the white collar American. I think of two commercials, one for an airline and one for a hotel chain, promoting free wireless internet—these commercials show business travelers “setting up” their office space in their seat or room, totally comfortable and totally productive. BlackBerries and PalmPilots enable work to follow us, willingly or not.
In comparing the use of digital media as a tool for maintaining personal relationships (social use) vs. a tool for conducting work-related business (private use), I wonder if anyone else sees the latter as more common to Americans? Perhaps, as Americans, we are less inclined to use media to foster close relationships and enhance face-to-face interactions and MORE inclined to use media as a way to compensate for physical distances and generally avoid confronting each other.
I haven’t finished Orality and Literacy yet, but I have skipped around a bit and have read Ong’s description of “secondary orality” at the end of Chapter 5. This is a new kind of orality that has many of the same characteristics of the old—it is participatory, communal, it concentrates on the present, and it uses formulas. Unlike primary orality, however, it is deliberate and self-conscious and is ultimately derived more from a literate consciousness than an illiterate one. It seems that in relation to the idea of “networked knowledge”, the next step in this progression should be a “secondary literacy.” This kind of literacy might build on certain aspects of a literate consciousness—elaborate verbal constructions, precision, complex reasoning—while making others irrelevant. Writing is no longer impossible to question or contest, and written communication is more interactive and participatory. The myth of the “definitive text” will no longer apply. More importantly, a secondary literacy could bring about a new kind of consciousness that exteriorizes thought; unlike oral cultures, which exteriorized thought through the physical, time-based process of speech, the new literacy will exteriorize through an ever-growing, always-changing body of text. It is another step in the movement from an oral-aural sensory world to one that relies almost exclusively on vision.
The question of interiorization vs. exteriorization of thought is an interesting one to me. If I were able to ask Mr. Ong a question, it would be an obvious one—how does he see our consciousness changing in a digital culture? What will be gained and what will be lost? If “print suggests that words are things,” what does a digital word, which can be modified or erased at will, suggest? Will this be a step towards further conceptualization of the world? Will it bring about a greater divide between humans and their physical environments, or even their own bodies?
While reading Ong’s “Orality and Literacy”, I found myself constantly applying scenarios of our digital culture to various statements about Oral or Chirographic / Typographic cultures. I agree with Rachel in that I think at least superficially the parallels with oral culture seem more obvious. But I found points of connection with oral, chirographic and typographic cultures – and the larger question that I ask is – how can this connection-making become a useful activity. What larger questions do we need to derive from this? For now, I will just make a few observations:
a) Self-evaluation modulated into group-evaluations (Ong. pg 54) … it seems to me that communal identity even if fictitious as in the MMO’s like World of Warcarft affects behavior and reward systems.
b) “real speech and thought always exist essentially in a context of give and take between real persons. Writing is passive, out of it, in an unreal, unnatural world. So are computers”. (Ong, pg78). Anyone who has written an email or comment on youtube and has suddenly felt the full wrath of masses descending on them on account of it, know that the written word on the internet is not an objective, unretractable thing. It is subject to the persistant culture of dialectic and negotiation in our networked society.
c) Of the messenger boys with no grammer school education, Ong says ” their expression has a formula like quality and strings together thoughts not in careful subordination but ‘like beads on a frame’ – recognizizably the formulative and aggregative mode of oral culture” (Ong pg 105) First of all I would like to know more about this case study and see if my immediate reaction of linking this to / recalling the language of “texting” has any reasonable basis.
d) As we get into issues like authorship, structure of narrative, the fictionalized reader, the flat or rounded character, we can easily make the case that MMO’s at least are a communal/narrative space wherein the “reader” has transformed into an avatar and is not lead into a structured linear (climax peaking) narrative as much as thrown in the middle of an episodic epic that he shapes as part of a communal authoring. Like the bard or storyteller who was a transmitter / narrator of pre-existing lore, the MMO player is a carrier and participant of pre-existing lore that he changes only a little bit with his participation. The closure and autonomy associated with published authors is not associated with text or graphics based digital narratives/games. Characters are types or archetypes by and large efforts to make them more “rounded” or endowed with psychological depth and individuality have not been very successful to my knowledge.
The introspective journals and novels (of chirographic and typographic cultures) lives on possibly in blogs … everyone it seems has a personal, intimate story to make public. If there is such profusion of private lives made public, I wonder if it does not become something else altogether, far removed from the mystery and sense of preciousness that one feels when reading an occassionally published diary.
Thanks to the perspective of Ong we are shown how orality once played into literacy or how one might have helped the other, but I have to ask whether or not that has changed given today’s world where society has and keeps grasping onto the newest technology. Has the newest technology with our portable laptops with built in wireless cards and our small PDA’s or iPhones where we can stay connected to the internet 24/7 changed our culture from oral or literacy learning people.
We learn in the book that cultures learned either oral or literature through one of two ways. You would have a culture learn through the normal methods of being taught by using books and text through academia or through learning from their surroundings and family given that some cultures did not have and writing or print. Though given past history, I sometimes wonder if technology has made society lose the ability to gain either.
Thanks to the things like the internet, people are using it as a quick way to learn with out having to do the hard work or research that they once did. It sometimes acts as a shortcut for one to learn the oral or lit experience they once gained through academia or real life experience. It’s mentioned in the book that some think that technology has hindered the creation of new text, and yet there are others that say that it has helped to even double the amount of literature that is written out there.
Is that really true? Sure new media and technology has helped people with their studies, but has it become a blessing or a problem. Students use the internet to look up information up instead of going to the library. Teen and young adults through the use of text messaging have made their own style of language abbreviating or shorting words so that they can create shortcuts within discussions where they don’t even have to be in a physical proximity of one another.
At one point in time people use to learn through meaningful methods. Whether it is for oral or lit purposes, for English or other languages and text, people wanted to learn and had to work for it. What I want to know is has the technology and new media of today become a new method for cultures to make it to next evolutionary step among orality and literacy, or have we witnessed a possible downfall for the two within society.
I think Mr. Ong is actually declaring that the oral cultures have survived throughout history in spite of the technological evolution of literary documentation and distribution methods. The vocal or uttered word still reigns supreme.
Mr. Ong declares that technology enhances human life and that the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato. Declaring that writing weakens the mind and destroys the memory. Users of writing will become forgetful relying on external resources for what they lack internally.
Ong refers to manuscript cultures remaining largely oral even in the retrieval of materials preserved in texts. The memorization of these manuscripts was highly encouraged and the creation of lists and indexes were developed to enhance the process.
The variety of methods available for modern day communication are more varied today than ever before. Computers and the internet have put the technology to publicize our stories or messages into a whole variety of literary or oral methods. Today’s stories can be recorded and distributed through radio, podcast, printed page, digital print, video or television.
I would ask two question of Mr. Ong:
(1) As civilizations or tribes migrated across the continents how did the exchange of stories through oral communications impact other civilizations? Did the keepers of the word or the elected story tellers convey the essence of their tales in the same descriptive manner with these other civilization as they did with their own people or tribe. Did they embellish the stories to seduce the listeners to embrace and accept the members of their tribe? Did the listeners receive these tales as historical documentation or BC entertainment? Did the story tellers omit that information no longer relevant in their own tribes?
(2) And the larger question isn’t how digital print will impact humanity but which method of communication will individuals choose for communication of their messages. Oral or print. Just as the technology of the written word allowed the recall and review of information for the masses, today’s computer has put the technology for communication in the hands of everyone with something to say. Is this a revival in oral communication?
This book is fascinating. Orality has a huge weight in modern day society. Howard Rheingold in ‘Smart Mobs’ mentions a certain pager sold way more than any other brand because a simple feature was added; it allowed you to send a heart – <3. Ever since our monkey ancestors climbed down from tree’s and took to the planes our hands became too busy picking berries to socially interact with flea-picking type interactions. Since we are such social creatures we had to find another way of communication – we turned to grunting and hooting. After thousands of years of refinement, our brain box’s became incredibly skilled at detecting and decoding the subtleties of speech. Ong mentios on page 5 of ‘Orality and Literature’ “the sophistication of phenomenal studies – the way language is nested in sound.” In ‘Blink’, Malcolm Gladwell mentions the studies of Bill Gottman. Gottman “could analyze an hour long [recording] of a husband and wife talking and predict with 95% accuracy whether that couple will still be married in fifteen years (blink, p21).” Gottman tried with shorter and shorter times, 15 minutes to 3 until, eventually (by Nalini Ambady), 10 seconds. The high frequency sounds were then removes from the audio clip, rendering the words incomprehensible; all that’s left “is a kind of garble” that keeps “such qualities as warmth, hostility, dominance, and anxiousness, and she found that by using only those ratings, she could predict which” people would remain wed or become divorced. The tone of your voice holds so much weight, even more so than the words spoken. Eddie Izzard mentions that body language combined with a confident tone equate 80% of an interactions worth; the words that are said matter a measly 20%. A physical, oral-based interaction is the most important form of conveying anything as holds such powerful emotional influence. Books have an emotional weight but that weight isn’t as hefty.
Speech is super important. Ong’s states that literature is a secondary model, born out of the primary model of orality. His most important point is this; (referencing Robert Wood, p19) “Memory played a quite different role in oral culture from that which it played in literate culture.” Ong didn’t stop at memory however; he goes on to describe how it can affect your entire world view. Being illiterate can completely change the landscape of the mind, changing the way you interact with the world.
In part two of the documentary “How Art Changed the World” it reveals how the first pictures ever made were created and how it triggered the greatest change in human history (or, to be more defined, human consciousness). That ability was to perceive images and symbols, 2D representations of objects. That moment in time happened roughly 35,000 years ago. We have been around for about 150,000 years, so that is extremely late in our evolution. For the visually minded, here it is the timeline expressed on some steps. (a screenshot from the docu).
Many of the cave paintings were painted in the pitch black – the darkest and narrowest part of the cave; they were almost inaccessible. These cave paintings were made up of dots and lines and shapes. The cave artist would paint horses and then cover them with a pattern of spots. Instead of asking why we painted these images, we should ask how we got the ability to create images in the first place. How do you know what a picture is if you’ve never seen one before? A Turkish man in the 19th century was shown a picture of a horse. The man had no idea what he was looking at – never in his life had he seen a picture before. He was a devout Muslim – extreme Islam forbids images of living creatures. He said he didn’t recognize it was a horse because he couldn’t move around it. If any of us look at a vivid painting of a horse the idea of it being incomprehensible makes absolutely no sense to us. If we look at a child’s attempt draw a horses outline, we can fairly easily guess what it is. We can’t imagine what it would be like to not understand what a picture was. This picture of a horse may look like a work of Jackson Pollack to an eye untrained in 2D symbols; it would appear as a random collection of lines and colours. This parallels fairly well with Ong’s depiction of literature completely changing our brains workings (p24) (although he doesn’t directly address the issue of how we began inscribing language – I recall reading somewhere the oldest inklings of language were found on some super old pots; random symbols were inscribed upon them to indicate what they contained).
San Bushmen in South Africa, living merely a few hundred years ago, depicted scenes incredibly similar to the oldest of cave paintings. Like the illiterates that were studied by A. R. Luria, (Ong p49) these San Bushmen are the closest living example of an archaic perspective. The San’s religion believed that when in a trance (or an ‘altered state of consciousness’) your spirit could leave your body and visit the spirit world. This tradition is still practiced by the San today. Their shaman dances and loses himself in the rhythm – becoming detached from what’s around him. Ong talks about the importance of rhythm in memory recall (p34); this fact is mentioned under the subheading titled ‘Mnemonics and formulas’. I can extrapolate this statement; rhythm directly taps into the workings of the mind. The San’s beliefs explain the paintings; the paintings were about spiritual experience in trance (33 minutes in).
Prehistoric cave folk painted oxen but ate deer – painting wooly mammoths but ate wide goats. There was little correlation between animals depicted in the drawings and the animals that they ate. Cave paintings weren’t about hunting, but about their spiritual encounters with the animals; paintings generally depicted the most gracious and powerful creatures that the tribes ran into. Cave paintings always depicted few key animals.
Both the Sans paintings in South Africa and the European cave paintings grafted parts of the animal onto the human figures depicted; generally horns and hooves. The cave paintings first found (in France) and the Sans Bushmen’s paintings both show an abstract pattern of dots, grids and zig zags covering the creatures painted. The brains of the people that generated the art created these patterns. When people go into an altered state the first thing they see is zig zag lines (Kandinsky), clouds of dots (Monet), and then grids (Mondrian) – they see these because they are hard wired into the human brain. To make this sound less ridiculous – the institute of psychiatry in London can hook you up to a machine that produces a trance like effect on your brain. They stimulate the visual parts of your brain; the users of the device say they see colourful dots with grids of black lines behind them. You can also experience these patterns when too little information gets into your visual system; people that are in the deepest nook, the darkest crevice of a cave for an extended period (or blindfolded) would also start to experience these visions. After an incredibly long time spent in a trance, the hallucinations from sensory deprivation start to take the shape of items that hold great emotional importance; the most powerful animals in that cultures vicinity (an Eland for a San Bushman or a Bison for the French cavemen). Visions created a familiarity with a 2D image and so the cavemen could project it onto a wall; it wasn’t a discovery, but a realization of self. They weren’t copying nature but reproducing images from within their heads. Louis Williams had the insight into most of these cave painting facts.
Literacy created a similar event; it gave us a realization of words. It separated words from the inner part of our minds, from our subconscious. ‘Subconscious’ and what is held there changes with each major epoch of human existence. Before literature the words were the event. Now they can exist in our minds as mutually exclusive objects.
Perhaps before cave paints existed, the world (animals, earth etc) and the person could not exist in the mind of the caveman in a mutually exclusive manor. Today a Gaia hypothesis of the earth exists, viewing it as one huge organism (which would likely make current day human a sort of cancer, and global warming its immune system – if we are causing it that is). A Gaia mindset was likely the view of the prehistoric folk. Native Americans certainly viewed the world in this way.
The parallels between cave paintings and modern art show that the pendulum of connectedness to mind is beginning to swing back to an inner-view of things. Picasso exclaimed ‘we have learnt nothing’ when he saw the cave paintings. He was wrong; we have learnt a lot about objective, empirical analysis of things (philosophy), but we are re-learning the direct connect with (Heidegger definition of) ‘being’. The age of reason coexisted with the growth of culture (first in Europe then in America) for a reason (Everything Bad is Good for you – Steven Johnston p186). We are now (and have been since I think postmodernist art, I’m not too involved in art history so I’m not too sure) moving away from this age of reason into an age of equilibrium. We shall not marginalize the inner side of our being (as we did when societies absconded an orality-based worldview for one grounded in the lens of literature), and we shall not marginalize the external part of our being (as we did during societies based on orality) (p46/47 Ong).
In illiterate societies ‘walking’ doesn’t pop into anyone’s mind as they walked, they simply did it and the word coexisted with the action. The citizens were ‘being’ without reference to their action, they were simply acting. The Dalai Lama in “The Universe in an Atom” uses a lock and key to explain interconnectedness. A key cannot be described without reference to another part – a lock. Oral societies view every word like this; connected to the action. Members of oral societies grouped the words ‘saw and log’ instead of ‘saw and hammer’. They don’t see ‘tools’ but they see’ how the tool is used’ (p51 Ong). In describing a car the literate folk described it in a flawed way – if they described a key in the same way, “it is made in a factory, it’s a piece of metal with grooves in it” it would be an incredibly stunted description. The illiterate folk, talking about a car, say ‘drive it and see’. They are more connected with the experience. They realize that simply describing something will not give someone the experience. Societies based on orality also give a very shallow and ultimately flawed view of what something is. Simply saying ‘drive it and see’ does not help paint a picture of what something is. The two have to exist in a symbiosis for people to fully realize what a car or a key is (although many of us drive cars and use devices that we don’t fully understand the workings of, which makes the experience seem more important than discerning it.)
Although they may have been closer to ‘being’, we are closer to escaping ego-consciousness through objectifying the self. In this empirical view of yourself you can realize ego and transcend it. Ong mentions that Homers epics, Odessy and Illiad, had graphic violence and acts of swinish heroics (p44). Everything you did in the times of orality were in reference to yourself. That makes for an incredibly self-involved worldview; one that fuels ego (Ong, p45). We can hopefully unify these two approaches to our existence and settle at a happy medium.
The religious gravitas of this switch from orality to literature may have been downplayed by Ong due to his Jesuit Priest status. It wasn’t only a forwarding of man, it was a heightening of consciousness that we can’t fully understand – we can merely view it through our lens (as he did through his lens). Reward for this change in worldview, like Pythagoras’s insight into the mathematical governing of events (particularly music) is seen as cold and calculated. It was an extreme swing of an (at that time esoteric) pendulum; it swung from extremely ‘connected’ during orality to being an observer of events during literacy. I don’t think that pendulum’s swing fully permeated society until incredibly recently, perhaps the early 20th century.
Literacy has created a worldview that is wholly removed humanity from this connection to not only our brain but to all things. Orality created a worldview that wholly removed humanity from a world outside of our own experiences. Once a middle ground is found, we will be forwarded.
whoops I left out the most important word, “print”, from this quote:
The age of reason coexisted with the growth of PRINT culture (first in Europe then in America) for a reason (Everything Bad is Good for you – Steven Johnston p186).
——————————–
And i’m changing the second to last sentance slightly to better express the difference:
Orality created a worldview that wholly removed humanity from a world outside of our own experiences; our connection with stimuli via interaction.
I found Luria’s studies of the oral cultures in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia the most fascinating. When the “illiterates” were given a list of objects to put into groups, they grouped them by their use and specific situations, rather than putting them into abstract groups by what type of objects they were. The same was true with describing geometrical objects in terms of real, physical objects of the same shape, such as calling a round object a “plate” instead of a “circle.”
His findings reminded me of an excerpt from an article I read just the other day in The New Yorker: “In medieval color charts, there were not names such as red or blue, but they actually gave nature words, like beau soleil.” ()
Even though this is a completely different culture and a different time frame altogether, both “oral” cultures used nature and physical objects to describe the world around them, which, I think, may explain why “illiterate” people don’t understand and have an aversion to modern and abstract art. As Mihai Nadin pointed out in one of his lectures, at some abstract art exhibition (of course, I don’t remember whose it was or when…) people came out and attacked the paintings with umbrellas. I noticed similar frustration in Luria’s subjects’ answers to questions like “what is a tree” and “how would you describe a car.” I may be completely off here, but maybe this is not a matter of taste but the result of a different way of thinking.
The most obvious paralell that can be drawn between printing and the internet is the similar ways they both challenged the previous technology and the obstacles they faced. As with the internet, most saw it as a great opportunity to publish their work and have it exposed to a much larger audiences with much less effort on their part. As with any new technology, there were of course many skeptics, but as Eisenstein points out, a number of those who refused to “upgrade” their manuscripts still made use of others’ print work. Much like in the early days of the internet and maybe even today, some don’t publish their work on the internet but definitely use the resources provided by others.
Also unsurprisingly, the printing press, much like the internet, challenged the need for memorizing things, and thus various mnemonic aids that were popular at the time, since knowledge could now be written down and more readily available (especially in the case of the internet).
But one thing I found surprising about the emergence of the printing press is that it had a lot more in common with the internet aside from the obvious things mentioned above. It brought people of different professions and social statuses together to collaborate on projects and help each other: “Problems of financing the publication of the large Latin volumes … led to the formation of partnerships that brought rich merchants and local scholars into closer contact.”