Got Some More Ong

Okay, so I'm going to try to get away from Ong after another post or two, but it is really important that I make a strong connection between the oral and the literate. I'll try to do some condensing...

In Chapter 4 of Orality and Literacy, Ong solidifies the idea that we are visual learners in a literate culture, and, by seeing the word on the page, we have put a sense of finality on ourselves that is extremely hard-- if not impossible-- to shake off. That sense of finality is what is hazardous to the primary oral culture because it is the process of naming with something physical that is permanent. He uses Plato's dialogue in Phaedrus to make an example of how an oral culture often views a literate culture. Essentially, Plato says (or rather, has Socrates say) four things:

1) Writing... is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. (I want to come back to that last statement shortly).

2) Writing destroys memory...Writing weakens the mind. By relying on an external source for their internal deficiencies will, according to Plato, make people forgetful. Ong makes the same comparison of children using pocket calculators for multiplication tables. The calculators relieve you of mental work that keeps you in shape.

3) a written text is basically unresponsive. If you ask a question of someone who just said something to you, you will ideally get a response. Written text just stars mockingly back at you. Ong says that the same principle is said of computers "Garbage in, garbage out."

4) Plato's Socrates also holds it against writing that the written word cannot defend itself as the natural spoken word can: 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 (79).

Ong is making quite a few statements about computers here, if you haven't noticed. Now he did write this in 1982, but he knew what he was saying. He presents writing as a form of technology. It is a part of our social progress and, therefore, our progress in consciousness. He argues that just as writing "heightens consciousness," so will computers in a different way.

The way writing heightens consciousness is that it internalizes the experience of giving and receiving information. There is a separation between the author and the text and the text from the reader because the reader isn't usually there after the author writes.

But written words sharpen analysis, for the individual words are called on to do more. To make yourself clear without gesture, without facial expression, without intonation, without a real hearer, you have to foresee circumspectly all possible meanings a statement may have for any possible reader in any possible situation... (104)

By separating the knower from the known (Havelock 1963), writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the external objective world quite distinct from itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set (105).

 So what does that mean? Basically that the act of writing words, from an oral culture's point of view, sets them in that finality I keep talking about. That means the writer has to delve into their own understanding of what that word means and make sure that, along with everything arranged around it, the word is used in its absolutely correct context. Even then, the reader is often not around the author, so the reader may read into a different context.

All of that though-- for the writer and the reader-- is a growth in consciousness.

Ong also argues (condensing Chapter 5) that print is an even further departure from oral culture. The sense of closure in print is even worse than with writing. "Print encloses thought in thousands of copies of a work of exactly the same visual and physical consistency" (132)."

The next big thing Ong argues really ties it in:  second orality-- what's to come after, or as an off-shoot, of literacy.

Ong's Orality Part Deux

Okay, so now that we've laid out a little ground work about what an oral and literate culture is, and how they differ, it's time to delve a little deeper.

The third chapter of Orality and Literacy is entitled "Some Psychoanalytics of Orality." In it, he begins to define the way the primary oral cultures process information and language. His first example throws back to the idea that we are visual learners:

Try to imagine a culture where no one has ever 'looked up' anything... the expression 'to look up something' is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning. Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. You might 'call' them back -- 'recall' them. But there is nowhere to 'look' for them... They are occurrences, events (30).

 That's an interesting concept to try to wrap your mind around. No only do the actions of the words we use to describe the visual way we handle information-- 'to look up'-- but the word itself implies visual stimulus. The last line is particularly interesting. To describe a word, but more specifically an utterance, as an event. An occurrence. That is something completely forlorn to our way of thinking. What that implies is that it can be missed or looked over (not looked... see? it's inescapable! misheard or not heard or missed). If a piece of the story is left out, that adds to the subjectivity of the story that gets passed on to other storytellers in other regions and so on. That will be addressed more in a later post.

Well, without the visual, how is it that an oral culture can learn and, more importantly, retain information? The same way someone memorizes a poem, or a guitar player memorizes scales, or the way you finally learned all the words to that song on the radio so you won't be mumbling every other word:  mnemonic patterns.

In order to fully remember all the stories, which are all the histories and folklore, in an oral culture, the listeners would use "heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antithesis," and other devices to help recall. Another aspect is the use of cliches which, as Ong says,

can be 'looked up' in books of sayings, but in oral cultures they 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 (35).

It's almost the exact same concept as musicians training their ears. For various intervals on between pitches, there are certain mnemonic devices that can be used. A tritone, or a diminished 5th, which would be a C to a Gb, is the open interval of the song "Maria" from West Side Story, or the interval used throughout The Simpson's theme song. By comparing each interval with a familiar song, it gives a frame of reference to the player's ear that makes learning much easier. But I mean really, who needs more of a reason to remember Natalie Wood?


Ong says the understanding of mnemonic thought provides a baseline to understanding other aspects of their thought processes. He categorizes characteristics of their thoughts and expressions in nine different ways. For the sake of time I will just list them, but I may come back and expound later.

1. Expression is additive rather than subordinative.
2. It is aggregative rather than analytic.
3. It tends to be redundant or "copious."
4. There is a tendency for it to be conservative.
5. Out of necessity, thought is conceptualized and then expressed with relatively close reference to the human lifeworld.
6. Expression is agonistically toned.
7. It is empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced.
8. It is Homeostatic.
9. It is situational rather than abstract.

These aspects of the primary oral culture are characteristic of their patters of thought and expressions. They, as Bingham says, "contribute to the saliency, and, consequently, enhance the memorability of an utterance." Instead of relying on specific words or, obviously, a text, the narrator tries to mesh the story with his framework of proverbs, maxims, and cliches that he has picked up over the years. This way, like the musical mnemonic devices, he has a frame of reference he can refer back to on the spot if ever he loses his place or forgets a line.

Write or Ong?

Alright. It's the home stretch. Time to get the hands dirty.

In the last post, I ended by trying to make an analogy for the connection between orality, literacy, and the digital humanities. The RSA video is a good example of how the digital humanities can be utilized in the future for educational purposes, and I'll talk more about that later.

Now it's time to talk about the Grand Master of oral studies:  Dr. Walter Ong. Ong wrote a book in 1982 called Orality and Literacy, which is his study on what happens to culture as it moves from a primarily oral culture to primarily literate one. For you language, post-colonial studies, oral communications, or other assorted nerds out there, it is incredibly interesting. But, for everyone who doesn't have time to read the whole thing, there's a very thorough review and summary by Art Bingham. I'll be taking some quotes from the book itself and the summary. The summary is using the 1988 reprint whereas I am using the 1982 original (citations, if necessary, at the bottom).

I suppose I should define, in my best terms, what makes an "oral" or a "literate" culture. When Ong speaks of an "oral" culture-- which is the way this project will coincide with it-- he means a culture that has never had any experience with written language, even its own. A literate culture, in turn, is one that is based primarily off the use of written text as its main mode of communication, education, and general transfer of information.

I'm just going to take Chapter 1 at the moment to give some direction. He begins by defining some basics about what an oral culture is and what a literate culture is, thereby setting up some boundaries for each to be studied. A few interesting quotes I found:

Ferdinand de Saussure...called attention to the primacy of oral speech, which underpins all verbal communication, as well as to the persistent tendency... to think of writing as the basic form of language...he thought of writing as a kind of complement to oral speech, not as a transformer of verbalization (5).

Language study in all but recent decades has focused on written texts rather than on orality for a readily assignable reason: the relationship of study itself to writing...Human beings in primary oral cultures, those untouched by writing in any form, learn a great deal and possess and practice great wisdom, but they do not 'study.' They learn by apprenticeship... by listening, by repeating what they hear... not by study in the strict sense (8-9).

In the beginning, Ong lays out some basics on how oral cultures operate with information. He brings in Saussure, who, as we've said, is important for the way in which WE (as a literate culture) view language and, as the next few quotes say, "words" in general.

 Writing makes 'words' appear similar to things because we think of words as the visible marks signaling words to decoders: we can see and touch such inscribed 'words' in texts and books. Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an often-told story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it (11).

 Though words are grounded in oral speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever (12).

Here, Ong introduces an idea that he goes back to in later chapters: the idea that, as literate cultures, we become almost completely visually based as opposed to aurally based. He challenges the reader to think of the word "nevertheless" for more than 60 seconds without thinking of the spelling out of the word itself. I couldn't do it either.

The visual part of our learning has lasting implications though, especially in response to the RSA video. Think about it... while that video has a strong oral component to it, it was still mostly visual! Drawings to represent the ideas and even text being written in-- "tyrannically" locked to the screen and your consciousness.

Ong's last point in the chapter is that the literate culture, right at the start, has a hard time even comprehending the concept of a primary oral culture. We always try to relate the oral culture in terms of the literate culture with terms like "oral literature" which he says is like describing a horse as a "wheelless automobile." "In the end," says Ong," horses are only what they are not."

He also goes on to say that literacy is the natural evolution of an oral culture. It slowly becomes aware of the possibilities that lie in embracing literacy. The problem becomes leaving so many aspects of a culture behind. He makes the argument, however, that "Literacy can be used to reconstruct for ourselves the pristine human consciousness which was not literate at all - at least to reconstruct this consciousness pretty well, though not perfectly" (15).

It is the leaving behind of orality to embrace literacy, and in turn the leaving of literacy to embrace digitization that I will be studying.

Works cited (just in case):
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Print.

Direction?

Idea.

So I'm trying to find some way to connect orality, literacy, and the Digital Humanities. Up until this point, I've been thinking from a literate point of view and treating the orality as something separate. If not separate then only connected to literacy and then literacy is only connected to the DH. But check this out:

This video is done by the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Apparently the British made up the rules for acronyms, because they're obviously allowed to break them. Anyway, I've been watching these videos for awhile now (God bless StumbleUpon) and I'm always completely engaged by them.

Before I talk about the content, I want to give some direction for future posts... This is a perfect example of exactly what the Digital Humanities can offer. The way RSA handles their videos is brilliant. It is combining a great combination of audio and visual stimuli to keep the reader engaged. But instead of just a video of someone talking about certain topics (interesting in its own right), they have utilized the ability that art has to grab people. It is almost like watching a story unfold before your eyes and it makes me wonder just how effective entire conferences would be if all the speakers doodled their ideas while they spoke.

My point is that this clip has captured oral, literate, visual, and (through the power of Youtube) digital aspects all in one fell swoop. Now I've been able to replace my view that orality, literacy and the Digital Humanities are connected by a one way street with the idea that there is a highway connecting them all and wrapping back around again.

The video is a portion of a longer presentation by Steven Pinker at a RSA conference. He is discussing his book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, and I think what he says here about innuendos ties into my previous post about the signifier and the signified.

In the same way that the word "tree" evokes a mental image of, not ONE particular tree but the embodiment of "tree" as it manifests itself through your memories, so do certain innuendos work to create his definition of mutual knowledge. The fact that I can say/write "tree" and you immediately have an image of a tree in your head while I have a tree in my head is a form of mutual knowledge. However, the fact that we are not picturing the same tree leaves the entire definition of "tree" to some arguable degree of subjectivity.

The presentation doesn't deal with semiotics as much as it does the infinite nature of language. Depending on the language used (Pinker's direct or indirect language) there could be a limitless number of translations that a person could come up in reaction to a certain statement, question, or phrase. This is a beautiful part of language in the same way that it can lead to that sort of awkward situation when you ask your boss to have a beer or as that scene Pinker discusses in When Harry Met Sally.

Connection. In the oral tradition-- that is in a culture that relies entirely on oral communication for history, stories, etc.-- there is a transfer of that subjectivity from generation to generation. By that I mean that the same story is never told twice because the listeners hear the story and reinterpret it in their own ways. There is a good example of this in the Anansi stories that originated in Africa and traveled to the Caribbean. Variations of the stories already existed in Africa, but they changed even more once they arrived in the Caribbean. It's like playing the game where someone in the room whispers a sentence in the next person's ear and it travels around the room. Once the sentence goes all the way around, it often doesn't even resemble the original sentence.

More to come later. I'm trying to go somewhere with this.

Language

To start off the exploration of orality, I want to play a clip from the movie Waking Life. Check it out:

The speaker touches on a few different topics in the video that are relevant to the discussion on orality and how it ties to literacy. One big one is the discussion on semiotics and the idea of the linguistic sign.

This term developed by Ferdinand de Saussure deals with the idea of language being broken up into the signifier and signified. Another name for these terms would be sound image (signifier) and the concept (signified). The Sign is then made up by an interplay between the signifier and the signified.

This idea is what the woman in the video is referring too when she talks about "love," or "saber-toothed tiger right behind you!" It's the idea that we assign certain concepts to the way our brain processes sound. The problem, as she says, is when we start to explain all the abstractions in our lives through the use of these terms that are just as abstract. Because the terms by which we define the abstractions (such as love or fear or thought) are just as abstract, the entire notion of understanding someone, while still relevant, has been made completely subjective.

This leads to frustration and getting lost in translation, but without that frustration, humans would have no desire to communicate. We naturally have a need to express emotions or thoughts, and the only way to do that is through our uses of language in all of it's confusing, entwining, convoluted glory.

The Digital Elite

One big fear every college student should have in this floundering economy is the fear of not finding a job in his or her field after graduating. More than that, the fear of being left behind in all the aspects that would get that student a job. Whether that be not up to date with the news, culture, technology, or whatever else; like sleep, it feels like it's impossible to catch up on once you've fallen behind.

So it is with the digital humanities. I just read this article by William Pannapacker from The Chronicle. He's discussing the digital humanities as a whole as he saw them represented at last years MLA conference. He touches on what I talked about in my last entry about being a purist and having older standards of what academia "should be."

...one panelist noted that there has been some defensiveness about the field, partly because it has included so many alt-academics who felt disrespected by the traditional academy: “Harrumph … Playing with electronic toys is not scholarship.  Where are your peer-reviewed articles?” I know from experience that there are plenty of people in the profession who know little about this established field and even regard it with disdain as something disturbingly outré and dangerous to the mission of the humanities.

He also goes on to say, "At this point, the digital humanities are The Thing.  There’s no Next about it. And it won’t be long until the digital humanities are, quite simply, 'the humanities... The grassroots days seem to be ending."

When I read this, my initial reaction is to fight tooth and nail. But by doing that, I give an answer to a theory he poses at the end of the article.

At the end, he is discussing how the digital humanities have pretty much exploded onto the scene from something that was completely reviled and feared to something that is "The Thing." He says that the DH could create a split similar to the Big Bang Theory. Those who are opposed or uneducated on the digital humanities will get left behind by some kind of "elite society" that is formed from complete digitization of the humanities. Would the uneducated ever be invited to, as Pannapacker puts it, "the cool-kid's table?" Could they? If not, then what would this do? Would that be an improvement on the humanities at all?

The growing tendency of the digital humanities to become an elite community—always pursuing the cutting edge—may leave most of us behind, struggling to catch up with limited support, and humanities education, in general, will be unchanged by the innovation and excitement promised by the digital humanities at this year’s MLA convention

It could take several generations to be completely caught up. I'm twenty years old right now and I'm just now getting acquainted with the digital humanities and they've been around at least twenty years. I don't have a smartphone. I don't have an iPad. I barely use Twitter. This is my first blog. I have a Facebook like everyone and (literally) their mothers, and that is it. Am I out of the loop? How fast will I have to run to be caught up with this digital society? Or do you even have to run? It may just be possible to log in.

One last point. He makes a very slight mention of a very big thing: money. It's a very small reference, but he says, "And maybe most important of all: There’s money, most obviously represented by Brett Bobley from the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities..." Bobley is the guy that I referenced in my first entry. It's interesting to add this very tiny perspective to the mix, and it gives a greater sense of gravity to the possibility of being "left out." Now if you're left out of the digital humanities circle, it may be the case that, not only will it be increasingly difficult to find a job, the ones you find in your field may not pay very much at all. Therein, the elites become stronger.

Digitization?

First real post has been a long time coming.

When I first heard about the Digital Humanities, I have to say I was a little frightened. Admittedly, I'm a bit of a purist: The Beatles' "Come Together" will always be better than Aerosmith's. Don't even get me started on Guns n' Roses covering "Knocking on Heaven's Door." And yes, the Black Eyed Peas completely destroyed "Miserlou." When I start reading about books being entirely digitalized in the future, classes taking place entirely online via web cam, or, as my Literature Criticism professor put it:

All the business and the way we conduct our lives (i.e. expression, education, humanities, trade, communication, and consciousness) will be brought to you by companies that don't exist yet through a continuous digital exchange.

I tend to get a little defensive.

Does that mean I'm against progress? Maybe, at first glance, but I don't think so. The thought is just so huge and so immediate on the horizon it kind of makes you want to go back in your shell for just a minute to sort it out.

But after reading this article I feel like I have a more positive jumping off point for exploring the Digital Humanities.

The article is taken from a presentation given by Brett Bobley, the Director of the Office of Digital Humanities in the National Endowment for the Humanities. He describes how technology is "game-changing" in terms of scholarship and education in general. He also gives a more concrete description of the digital humanities for all the noobs out there (such as myself):

 We use “digital humanities” as an umbrella term for a number of different activities that surround technology and humanities scholarship. Under the digital humanities rubric, I would include topics like open access to materials, intellectual property rights, tool development, digital libraries, data mining, born-digital preservation, multimedia publication, visualization, GIS, digital reconstruction, study of the impact of technology on numerous fields, technology for teaching and learning, sustainability models, and many others.

In a sense, the digital humanities include everything needed to practice any sort of scholarship. He also talks about "the stereotype of the “lone scholar,” toiling away in a library studying these cultural heritage materials." This is where my nostalgia kicks in. I love to see the images of the scholar in dim, dusty, candle-lit libraries, poring over volumes of history or literature or science all written on brittle parchment with a quill. That is, of course, my personal poetic view. But even though I know that image has been dead for some time, I still hold on to it as a metaphor for the trouble and torment that is the learning process and the acquiring of knowledge.

I suppose the metaphor and meaning stay the same, but now the image has changed.

Now you get another image: a red-eyed college student staring at a computer screen with a minimum of nine windows open (eleven tabs on each window and at least one on each window is Facebook), an empty bowl of Ramen sitting next to a dirty microwave, a pack of Camels with one left, and a few empty beer cans under the computer chair. Somehow the first image seems so much more admirable. Even if the scholar likely got tuberculosis from all the dust and died a young death, the pain felt in the pursuit of knowledge can be felt (and no it doesn't start with a slight cough... hopefully you've had your shots). The second image (if you identify with all of the psychological side-effects of sleep deprivation) leaves you feeling disgusted and numb.

But this new image carries a lot of deeper implications as far as what the digital humanities are and can do. Bobley says:

 Never before have scholars had access to such a huge volume of materials. This kind of scale adds new challenges and new opportunities. A scholar of 19th century literature could never hope to read every book published in the 1800’s – but a computer can. A historian who is studying World War II could never hope to read every newspaper editorial about the war – but a computer can... We have only begun to scratch the surface on how this mountain of data might be used to advance humanities research. But now that millions of books and newspapers are right at our fingertips, we must ask: What new knowledge can we acquire? What new questions might the data drive us to ask? How might it help the scholar locate new materials ripe for close reading? How might old theories be questioned and new ones posed?

It's these questions that the digital humanities want to answer. If not answer, then, at the very least, explore. The possibilities of having all the known information in all of human history at your fingertips is an incredible idea. We've already accomplished so much, but, as it is with knowledge, the more you know, the more you realize you don't.

As I said, I am still hesitant about what total digitization could mean. I love the feel of a book in my hands and the feeling that I get when I turn the last page over and set it down with a soft thud on my nightstand. No iPad, Kindle, Nook or cranny, will ever replace that feeling. But the future is here, and it is better to face it head on then to let it catch me looking backwards.