Two Stories

So I was thinking about the Grateful Dead concert I posted and how that was a continuance of the oral tradition. Ong would say no, because the fact that it's recorded makes it basically a type of print. But I think that that is just part of the secondary orality-- it's what we have to work with. Storytelling, concerts, and conversations can only take place in the true primary oral sense if they are experienced in person. The second orality has to capture the opportunities technology has to offer in order to manifest itself.

SO, talking about secondary orality in the world today. I think a really good way to look at it is through the use of musical recordings and concerts. When an artist performs a song in a different style, or covers a song from a another artist, they are carrying on the message of that song with their own added flavors. This is very similar to the way oral cultures performed storytelling. The audience would listen closely, learn the story, and then retell it in their own ways.

A good example is the song Gin and Juice by Snoop Dog and a cover done by The Gourds. All you need to hear is the first few lyrics, but if you can listen up to the chorus it is awesome (Explicit Lyric Warning):

 Did you find some differences? Stylistically the song has changed completely, but the core of the song is still exactly the same. Think about what this means. Snoop Dogg rapping on stage is going to attract a completely different demographic compared to a country bluegrass band from Austin, Texas. The different styles of storytelling make the story more available. Does that make one version better than another? That isn't even an argument. The fact is that it is two storytellers doing what they do in two different ways.

Digital Classroom

Check out this article from The Chronicle of High Education.

There's definitely some more digital humanity business going on. I feel like this wouldn't be as applicable toward the idea that the D.H. can recapture the oral culture. I actually think this particular instance is working against it. While college classroom lectures aren't exactly what Ong had in mind when he discussed primary orality, they are still a form of primarily oral communication with the opportunity for discourse.

I don't necessarily agree with the fact that traditional classrooms are on the way out. I can see how they would be diminishing, but it seems as if there will always be enough students who either want or have to come to class. Personally, I have a hard time taking internet classes. There are too many distractions and the disease of procrastination sets in strong. I'm much better in a classroom setting, even if I don't want to show up all the time.

Even so, it's another picture of what the D.H. can do. In speaking of, I got REALLY excited about this:
Berkeley Podcast. It's every lecture of certain classes offered at Berkeley! Pretty sweet little set up here. While I think that this might make students in the classroom feel less inclined to go to class, it is a really cool thing for everyone else who can't afford Berkeley but want to explore different educational settings and experience that kind of class. Why, yes. I am a nerd.

Digital Library

So I've been wanting to post this for awhile. It's not directly related to my aforementioned thesis-ish statement, but it's an informative video. It's a part of the Technology, Education, Design (TED) conferences. I think that these conferences, along with the RSA and others, are brilliant examples of what the digital humanities can offer in terms of education opportunities. More on that later...

 So Brewster Kahle has developed a feasible way in which to digitize all of the written material in the Library of Congress and one day... THE WORLD. I expect some diabolical laughter at that point. Not only that, but it would all be free! (more diabolical laughter).

This is a good example of what the digital humanities can do. His website, The Internet Archive, has everything from Walt Whitman to the Grateful Dead to 16th century prose. How cool is that? The ability to access all of that information from one place... for FREE.

To tie it in, this is also a good example of the preservation of the oral culture-- the video and the archive that is. The video because the TED conference is set up as a series of talks in which people with ideas get onstage and basically just go off about their ideas. Mostly an oral function with a captive audience. The archive by capturing interviews and concerts, such as the Grateful Dead. The Dead was what would come to be known as a "jam band." A whole lot of their stage time at shows was spent jamming out and improvising around songs they already knew. Sound familiar? This meant that no performance was ever exactly alike. However, now Kahle has them stored, forever sealing their permanence in the world of digital print. Just because there's nothing overly fun on this blog, I'm leaving this post with something tasty...

Secondary Orality and a Thesis-ish statement

So we're about to say "Goodbye" to Mr. Ong. Been fun.

I left the last post mentioning Ong's idea of what he called the "secondary orality." In a sense, Ong is directly addressing the onset of the digital humanities which, in 1982, were just beginning to take form with groups like Project Gutenberg.

Ong's argument is that the new orality (using telephones, radio, email, and some computer systems at the time) is similar, but still different, to the primary oral cultures. He says that it brings back the sense of the group and of community that writing had no part of. We are now turned toward each other, having discourse with other human beings, as opposed to having our heads buried in unanswerable text. The reason for this, however, is because we have already seen the inside of ourselves. Therein lies the difference: the secondary orality is just as introspective as literary culture, because now we must examine ourselves in the context of everyone else, not just through dead words on a page.

Ong suggests that the new orality has replaced the old, but not without borrowing some of the same concepts. Our presidents can speak directly to us, similar to his example of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. But now the information flows one way. The conversation is not really a conversation at all since there is no way for immediate reply, unlike the presidential debates in which a throng of people expressed their agreements or disagreements at the source.

So how does this all tie in?


We live in time vastly different even from 1982. Ong's idea of the new orality creating a stronger social connection (he cites Marshall McLuhan's Global Village) has increased exponentially. Now Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and social media dominate our lives. The one way media sources of radio, television, etc. are not the same. Now with technology like the iPhone, Skype, and chat features, the relationship is two-way in many cases.

Okay so... thesis? Maybe? Well here is a claim anyway:  Through the use of social media and the technology behind the Digital Humanities, it is possible--maybe inevitable-- that aspects of oral culture will manifest themselves in modern culture.

This is already seen in those RSA videos. While based primarily off of text and visual stimulus, there is still an oral component. The video provides the viewers with their mnemonic devices so that they will remember it when trying to relate the video to someone else.

So lets explore the digital culture.

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.