Friday, May 6, 2011

Temporary Closure

Okay, I'm going to make an attempt to wrap this whole thing up for the moment.

I have to say, first of all, that I have enjoyed this method of research and response. This is my first blog and, as I have always been fairly ignorant of the whole blogosphere that has existed for well over a decade, the thought of maintaining one unnerved me at first. However, I have actually grown pretty fond of it and could definitely see myself utilizing this in my personal life as well as my professional life (whatever that will be). The educational opportunities here are great and I think the network that can be created is extremely beneficial.

I would also like to keep posting on this blog as I find more information on the subject. There has been a lot I've skipped over or left out that would be very beneficial for my argument, but maybe I can revisit those soon. There's also more that I haven't discovered yet. For instance, tomorrow evening I am putting on a poetry and short story reading in my hometown that I'm planning on recording and uploading on Facebook and on here. I think it would be a great addition to my topic, especially with the talks about spoken word poetry. This is our third event, and it is really great to experience something that is based in oral tradition. Hopefully there will many more events, each unique, that I can upload.

So down to business.

We started with a talk on language and the meaning we assign to words as being completely arbitrary to the words themselves. This is embodied in the ideas of Saussure's signified and signifier, and it ties in later on with the discussion of orality and literacy. The meaning of words being assigned by us as humans plays a role in Steve Pinker's lecture on human nature and social relations that I discussed earlier.  Since we, as humans, have assigned-- and continue to assign--meanings to words, it only makes sense that, by taking a closer look at language, we can understand aspects of human nature. Pinker does this by looking at implied meanings such as what lies behind the old phrase, "Would you like to come up and take a look at my etchings."

I also looked at the video itself that was being presented. The video is a great representation of the potential offered in the digital humanities. It combines aural with visual stimulus to create a thoroughly engaging, educational tool. This visual and aural combo goes right along with Walter Ong's idea that we are a visual culture: the idea that we think of words in terms of the words actually being spelled out visible on the page as opposed to words as sounds. When a word is a sound only, as it is in oral cultures, it becomes an experience (or an event or occurrence, as Ong says) in space and time. The audible sound, unlike text, is not locked into space and time, however, because it then become subject to the memory of the listener.

Memory then is one of the biggest aspects that separates oral and literate culture for a few different reasons. The first is that oral cultures have to rely much more heavily on memory because that is their only mode of transfer of history, ritual, and, ultimately, culture. Literate cultures don't need to put such a strong emphasis on memory because their information is all written down and stored. All they (we) have to do is pick up a book and "look-up" the information we need. Since oral cultures have "nowhere" to look, they store it all internally so that they can reproduce it later. They do this by using mnemonic devices, something familiar to the literate world, but not used in the same ways (i.e. the using of mnemonic devices in the learning of musical intervals as opposed to memorizing a poem, which is almost a type of muscle memory).

Another difference is the community that memory creates. While memory is an individual process,  oral cultures relied heavily on communities to help remember stories. A really good example of this is at the end of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury where some of the characters have memorized entire books in order to preserve the books history and message. In oral cultures, the stories were meant to be told and retold to communities to keep them fresh and to pass them on. In the tellings, the speaker would hone his own craft with the practice while the listeners (and future storytellers) would build their own stocks of mnemonic devices and figure out how to use them effectively. The entire process of storytelling and preserving history was entirely based on the concept of a strong community.

According to Ong, individuals in literate cultures are more separated. Not necessarily isolated, but separated because of the words themselves. The word, once written down, has been given a feeling of finality and "closure." The word becomes something separate from the author and is then read by the reader, who is also separated from it. The author assigned his own meaning to the word, but the reader is then propelled into an internal dialogue with the word and himself on trying to understand it. As I said in one post, "writing... internalizes the experience of giving and receiving information." This, Ong says, is why literacy raises consciousness. It forces the individual to ponder all the different aspects of meaning and being in words and self.

(Taking a breath.)(Drinking some water.)

Still awake?







Ong also introduces the idea of the secondary orality. Since he wrote his book in 1982, his ideas of technology were the television, radio, and telephone. High tech for almost 30 years ago. But now we have the internet. Now we have iPads. Now we have social networking. His view has not changed too much, but it definitely has a whole new arsenal of toys to play with.

The second orality, to Ong, borrowed from the primary oral cultures, but applied the technology of the literate cultures. I agree with that idea. Primary orality in a literate society is simply not possible. The frames of thought are completely different and one finds it hard, if not impossible, to relate to the other. With secondary orality, the technology is able to capture some parts of the primary orality and make it available to the literate culture. My example of this is pretty much every video I posted, but with special attention to the Grateful Dead concert and Taylor Mali's spoken word performance. While these things are not the same, despite their aural characteristics, as information in an oral culture, that is what we have to use in order to maintain our own tendencies toward orality.

That is also, in effect, my main argument. By rediscovering the concept of community found in oral cultures and by utilizing the introspection that raises consciousness made prevalent in literate cultures, the digital humanities are putting us on the threshold of a new consciousness. We are an increasingly socially based culture. With new so many ways to connect to people like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, smartphones, Skype, etc. and all sorts of new technology to access them, the world has gotten smaller and we have gotten closer. People who have the same or opposing thoughts and ideas can interact with each other and have discourse in order to grow in their own consciousnesses. The presentation of information itself is changing and becoming more interactive. The last video of that new eBook for the iPad is a good example. It combines oral aspects, documentary footage, and access to other information outside of the book itself. That sort of interaction with information has never been available before and has only come out in the extremely recent past. What can we do with it in the future? While it is still too early to tell, rest assured we are in for serious changes in the way we obtain, process, and broadcast information.

I haven't given any answers or predictions with regard to my argument, and I don't think I will be able to anytime soon. There's a lot more research to be done-- a lot more exploring to experience. I have only scratched the surface (if that) and have already missed a lot and excluded more. I want to keep this up though, and fully document where we are going as a culture and as a consciousness. It will be interesting and I'm glad that I'm along for the ride. Maybe I'll take one of the wheels one day. That's a scary thought.

For now though, goodbye and goodnight.

No comments:

Post a Comment