Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy continues to fascinate me. His third chapter, “Some Psychodynamics of Orality” was an interesting investigation of sound generally and the psychodynamics of primary oral cultures. In oral cultures, which lack any conception of writing by definition, communication relies on sound and gestures. Oral expression is, according to Ong, an impermanent occurrence. When a movie is paused there is still an image, but when a song is paused there is no more sound.[1] As Ong puts it: “sound exists only when it is going out of existence” (28).
He goes on to explore what this premise means for oral cultures in contrast to literate cultures that rely on silent texts. Recollection in literate societies simply involves looking something up or backtracking on a page, however oral cultures organized information differently – relying on rhythms, patterns, and mnemonics for easier recollection.[2] According to Ong, this type of intellectual organization precludes certain kinds of critical analyses and types of thinking which literate cultures can engage in. In fact, Ong suggests that within oral cultures cliché, proverbial-like sayings “are not occasional. They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them” (31).
Statements like this are what prompted me to write in my margins some variation of “what about today?” Earlier Ong had stated that “sustained thought in an oral culture is tied to communication” (30). I’m curious how statements like these can be assessed and applied to today’s culture which is primarily visual and where most composition occurs online. Interestingly, as Ong went on to describe certain characteristics of expressions and thoughts within oral cultures it seemed to me that there were a number of curious similarities with Facebook.
Facebook, of course, is inhabited exclusively by literate people and provides a space wherein people connect and communicate primarily through printed words. Nevertheless, it is a unique space (similar to Ong’s “human lifeworld”) where texts take on the embodied characteristics of oral communication. Ong talks about texts as decontextualized and inhuman and uses the list as a consummate example where names can be listed as mere, neutral representations for actual humans. At first glance, Facebook employs lists of the kind that only literate cultures could construct and yet they are far more contextualized. The most prominent list that a Facebook user interacts with is the Friends List, but the names are anything but neutrally-oriented. Not only are they always accompanied by their profile picture but hovering over any name on the list shows you the amount and select pictures of mutual friends as well as the option to send them a personal message. These lists are presented in the context of human relationships and activity which characterizes the genealogical or political lists in oral culture more similarly than it does a list of American presidents in a reference book.
I think Facebook communication also shares oral cultures’ pragmatic uses of language (e.g., “LOL; Friend me!”), and is similarly empathetic and participatory (e.g., comments, likes, immediately accessible author profiles, etc.), however, the most interesting similarity between the world of Facebook and oral cultures is Ong’s description of the latter’s homeostasis. Ong suggests that “oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance” (39). Facebook is temporally-oriented to prefer newer information.[3] Whether it is the ever-changing News Feed or a person’s Wall, as information gets older and is replaced by newer updates, Facebook deems the newer information more relevant and eventually pushes the old information into the realm of “older posts.” Present (read: relevant) interactions with old information is recorded accordingly in the News Feed, but sooner or later the information is (practically) forgotten rather than archived.
Ong’s examples of changing genealogies is perfectly analogous to the ease with which I can de-friend someone, get married, or reject a family tree offer regardless of the information recorded in government archives. If such a change suits my present purposes, then altering Facebook-relationships is as easy as changing the words to a genealogical narrative.
I’m still working through how and if these similarities can answer my earlier questions, but it is interesting to see how Facebook – an ostensibly text-oriented space – can share characteristics which, according to Ong, belong distinctly to oral cultures.
[1] Communicative gestures rely on their close association with these “effervescent” sounds and therefore, presumably, suffer from the same degree of impermanence though Ong’s focus is aural.
[2] This relates back to last chapter and the work that had been done with Homer’s Illiad and the surprising number of cliché phrases and patterns that were employed (which proved to be a significant piece of evidence that convinced some that Homer was illiterate).
[3] This preference is another similar concept listed elsewhere by Ong; see pg. 35
DJ,
ReplyDeleteWonderful post - excellent discussion of central points in Ong, and a fascinating extension of Ong's concepts to Facebook. Here's another potential connection that occurred to me as I was reading your post. One of the arguments one sometimes hears from some well known writers and scholars is that the explosion of writing that has occurred in the last 5-10 years is to some significant extent taking care of past problems and equipping students with rich new literacies that teachers have failed to appreciate. For example, Andrea Lunsford, one of the most widely cited scholars in rhet/comp, write that "We're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization." NCTE president Kathi Yancey she claims we have entered "the Age of Composition," and internet visionary Clay Shirky states that we are living through "the largest increase in expressive capability in history."
This increase in writing is celebrated and used to argue that many problems are in some sense taking care of themselves. Lunsford led the Stanford Writing project, which examined the digital writing practices of hundreds of Stanford students over 5 years. She invites us
to generalize from this to student populations across the country. Yet these are the writing practices of what may be the most high tech, well-equipped, and privileged group of students on the planet. (Makes me think we badly need a Harvey Graff to provide the empirical and historical data to seriously challenge the "digital literacy myth" providing cover for too many of these schemes.)
But as you suggest, much of the writing described as new media - such as elements of communication on Facebook - is much closer to speech than writing. If I spend two hours a day texting and tweeting, it's not clear I'm doing anything much more intellectually challenging than talking to the barista at the Peabody's kiosk - this may in fact be challenging, as there is a live interlocutor to coordinate with and entertain.