Asking all my life.
It’s that time of year! I do Movember every year for their support of mental health. Let’s be honest Men don’t speak up, and we should.
This year, is a bit different than normal if you want to watch the dailies:
As always, please donate here.
I was not the captain this week. I was a deckhand being ordered about from bow to stern, trying to stay standing as the ship rocked heavily on the ocean.
I dreamt for the next dock. The sound of the waves and wind are beautiful, but after too long is tinnitus that requires a long, long silent sit on dry and solid land to get reprieve.
Maybe next week I can at least be the navigator I think to myself.
With what’s happened this week in the US, I’m going to focus in on the next characteristic of an oral culture that I think fits the bill. While moments like these have many more moving parts and are much more complex, perhaps there’s something in this one that might be relevant.
I’ve talked about this before, but let’s use it in terms of Ong this time. In his characteristics of an oral cultures he calls this:
Oral cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frame of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the human lifeworld
In other words, abstract generalisations go out the window. Inference and logic are illogical. An oral mind will stay rooted in the here and now and won’t even entertain the idea abstraction.
What’s in front of them is the truth. Only what they’ve experienced is the truth. Trying to understand someone or something else is impossible and any exercise to go deeper is irrelevant.
In Cognitive Development, It’s Cultural and Social Foundations by A.R. Luria, a fascinating read, they were able to study a pocket of preliterate society as it transitioned into literacy. They asked a lot of interesting questions to see what how they would answer.
Here’s one small example, Ong, outlined. When asking the participants to name shapes, they never used the general name of the shape, instead:
This study continues to ask them to group even more things: people, situations, trees – and time after time, they refused.
Here’s another test performed. Give someone 4 items ( pictures of the items ), and have them take one away based on any defined grouping
You try:
But what happened in the majority of cases, preliterate people didn’t, and wouldn’t, group these things with attributes, but by situation. And, they would either deffer, reject, or expand the situation to not exclude anything. Here’s an example of someone, given glass-saucepan-spectacles-bottle, who almost got there:
These three go together, but why you’ve put the spectacles here, I don’t know. Then again, they also fit in. If a person doesn’t see too good, he has to put them on to eat dinner
It wasn’t like they wouldn’t do the exercise, but something was in their mental process was blocking them; they couldn’t do the exercise.
It might then be no surprise what happens when you expand grouping to inferring.
Here’s a very, very simple inference.
If Bobs steals, and stealing is bad, Bob is bad.
To the literate mind, that logic tracks. However, an oral mind will buck up against the whole premise. An oral mind, like asking to group items, won’t even play along. It might even fight you saying “I don’t really know Bob, how can I judge?”
Voting.
Voting requires ones ability to infer a candidate is good or bad. Voting requires the ability to create generalisations about someone, their behaviour, their history, their beliefs, to determine if the politician or party would serve your best interest in the future.
If someone looses the ability to make abstractions and generalisations, what happens?
Photo by Soraya Irving on Unsplash
Where was I in reviewing Ong’s characteristics of an Oral culture? I can’t recall.
A little searching ( clickity clickity )… here it is.
For the most part, as you may have guessed, I’ve been arguing that we are returning to a mostly oral culture by saying we have the most of the characteristics. However, this is one where it doesn’t fully lock in for me yet; where technology and aliterate may divert, or perhaps still getting there. I’m going to try and further my stance that we are moving towards an oral society. But there are some big gaps here – it’s a work in progress; close, but maybe not close enough? You be the judge.
You know what you can recall: Mnemonics and Formulas
In an oral culture complex thoughts are tied to mnemonic trickery: trinkets and patterns, lyrics and rhymes; dances and body movements; sights and sounds; metaphors and stories. All those little rhymes your grandmother knows had a purpose.
In literate culture, technology offloads that knowledge into some device: a stone tablet, a book, a website. We don’t need any Mnemonics when we can now open a browser to, say “Hey Siri…” Perhaps the formula is knowing the right search terms? But that’s a very very loose argument.
The whole point of a mnemonic device is to unravel a memory or knowledge. To use the device and share it with others to help them remember. It could be something simple and concrete: Never Eat Shredded Wheat ( North, East, South, West ), or Roy G. Biv ( a colourful dude playing piano on a rainbow ).
While perhaps they aren’t traditional mnemonics, we do have memes. Oh boy, do we have meme’s! You’ve seen them, understood them, or perhaps misunderstood them for a while now. “One does not simply” need a picture to understand. Also one does not simply need words either
Perhaps we’ve extended traditional mnemonics more than Ong could have imagined? We now have included a wealth of mediums, contexts and sub-context.
Original mnemonics require training, and shared background to unpack. Meme’s are no different. See how many unlock shared knowledge for you?
Now, most meme’s are intended to provoke humor. Some might find them more social commentary, debating their use. Do meme’s help us remember quantum mechanics?
Outside of the Mnemonic/Meme, there was another passage in Ong’s explanation specifically about mnemonic training:
[An] interlocutor is virtually essential: it is hard to talk to yourself for hours on end. Sustained thought in an oral culture is tied to communication.
“Can you say that in a sentence?”
“So Eugene already had a leg up—an interlocutor could explain away any failed communication.”
So, with AI, we create a technological interlocutor. Needing to have a dialogue with a computer to retain knowledge. A single question in Google is no longer enough. Keywords are no longer enough. We are starting to need a conversation; dialogue, no matter how light or fallible it is right now, to retrieve knowledge.
How often do you ask Siri or use Copilot instead of a “classic” search?
I can’t go down this mental rabbit whole without making reference one particular episode of Star Trek. Whether you are a trekkie or not, there is one episode perfect for a communications geek like me, Damok. Which introduced the Tamarians, who speak only in metaphors and allegories.
Feel free to go down the wikihole, I have several times, and will likely again after I hit publish on this post. What I noticed immediately, was the almost visceral reaction to the oral nature of the thought experiment.
How could an oral society have advanced technology?
And that.. that right there, that sentiment, is what I believe to be the future catalyst for so much trouble.
This week I’ve really been digging into all thing Giles Turnbull: Weeknotes, The Agile comms handbook.
So, per agile comms, when in doubt – weeknotes.
I’m hoping to shake off my self censorship and silence. I default to “not saying” lately and I don’t like it. So, try something new, right?
Also, I’ve been thinking a a lot about internal comms this week. Something I feel so passionately work should do something about it and fix. It’s something I’m willing to be fired for. I’ll keep going and pushing and fighting and trying. I’m going to trust that instinct.
Movember 2024 is around the corner and it’s time to look back and plan this years reverse mo route.
But what’s this!? I forgot to post a 2023 recap. I must have been uprooting my life to move the whole family to a new city or something. 😜
There’s literate and then there’s proficiently literate. This whole idea that we are tipping into the postliterate relies on the idea that we are all literate; just don’t seem to care; prefer other oral based media.
So are we?
For the purposes of my little thought experiment, let’s use 50% of a population as a tipping point: greater, even by 0.1% is a sway to literate sensibilities, lower oral.
We’ll start at roughly 1450 AD, when Gutenberg invented the mechanical printing press. Since then, like flat screen TVs, the cost of the printed word has scaled down to the point that any class has the means to obtain it.
Here’s the timeline from what happened then ( +/- a few years ).
Literacy rates in the world stay strong. We could do better, but we tipped the numbers, from 12% who could read to 14% who can’t.
The world is literate, but how well is it literate? To understand quality, we’ll use PIAAC Proficiency Levels. It’s a scale from 0-500.
So where does the world stand? The national average is 267 (level 2).
Now here’s something I think merits closer attention. Let’s look at the US. A country that started as a world leader in literacy. And, let’s bring out that 50% measuring stick again.
In 2012/14 50% were Level 3 (>275). In 2017 they lost 2 points. Now 52% are level 2.
Does this mean there is a downward trend? Is their proficiency continuing to drop? Still unknown.
Canada, US & Australia haven’t been keeping up on sharing literacy rates or PIAAC data, if they even have any. So it’s hard to know for sure at the moment.
Here’s a Canadian report back to 2012 that shows how low proficiency levels are then (note: this report used quartiles to divide the PIAAC levels into grades)
Here’s my theory. When Literacy Rates are high but < 50% are proficient, you’ve got fertile soil for aliterate oral culture.
My personal feeling, is like autism and other spectrums aliteracy and oral sensibilities can fluctuate. Just like you see in proficiency rates, some cultures are less and more aliterate than others. They may be swayed by oral discourse and rules. Perhaps this can be applied to any culture & sub-culture not just geographic?
For a small blip in our history, our technology required us to be proficient. To type commands, to program computers to do things. And in it we buried our oral nature in a pile of books, an accumulation of words greater in the past few years than the combined history of written words. And yet things are changing. Technology has passed the tipping point that our primal, oral nature is coming back.
I have to remind myself I’m a parent with ADHD. I considered myself mildly ADHD. For over 40 years my alternative coping strategies mostly worked.
Then my first child. Then the second. That’s when my struggles tipped.
I’ve been thinking about my biggest hurtles lately trying to find ways to cope. This isn’t a post to fix ’em, more a post to share the struggle.
My first realization of the new world demand was holding my new born daughter while my 3yr old son was slowly falling backwards off a swing. Having to make that split second decision not to drop the baby while my son dropped onto the wood chipped ground. Did I make my decision based knowing he would be safe on softish ground, or was I frozen?
Now at 5yr and 2yr it’s always a battle for who gets your attention, with all the banging screaming and repetition that comes with that.
How do I pick, who do I pick, what should I pick, if any? I think I’ve come to the conclusion for me it’s the idea of sensory indecision. So many inputs coming at me, plus the inputs inside my head, it becomes overloaded. To much. And it it a paralysis of sorts.
When the kids are at school I get to sink into the work day. One of the other hardest times for me is 4pm – when I say “Oh crap, time to get the kids!”
I never give myself the right heads up, or ramp down. I always forget.
Over the course of the next few hours I go through the motions. Trying to listen, to start planning dinners with my partner, walking kiddos around the neighbourhood knocking on doors to play with friends. But in my head, I haven’t switched gears.
I’m still thinking about work. Problems still running around in the noggin that need a solution.
When someone brought up the term “context switching,” I thought “Ah Ha! That’s what it’s called”.
Remember those kids vying for attention? Yah, they don’t care about context switching.
Add to that, they are experts and context switch mid sentence a thousand times a day; the dramatic emotional changes, the here-there running from place to place; the labyrinth of pre-logical minds. It’s a mine field of switches to keep up with. My mind ends up feeling dazed and confused like a rag doll smashing about holding onto the leash of a bear.
I’ve tested my will power enough to know I’ve got the chops to go cold turkey on most things, and if it weren’t for that, I doubt I would be able to come close to do this.
I’ve been able to ignore a lot of the impulses.
Through selflessness and love for my family I have been trying my best to stay snuggling on the couch, making their lunches, getting them dressed, going for walks, instead of tinkering or doing whatever that “other thing” is roaming in my mind.
I used to think that was a good idea. Why wouldn’t it be better to be with them instead? I’m starting to wonder and reconsider. I’ve been depriving myself, that voice, for too long.
Some of those thoughts and impulses were things, in hindsight, I loved. I miss them. Some of them I could only do in small doses. Some I needed big swatches of time. But either way, they have been left undone and slightly neglected.
“Maybe when they get older” my friends and I all say ( for many reasons ), “they’ll calm down, and you’ll get back to some balance”
“Maybe. Maybe.” I say.
But I don’t think that’s my answer. To wait 5 or so more years?
So what am I doing about it? This blog.
It’s one of those voices I’ve been ignoring. If it hasn’t been a work report, and to do lists, birthday invitation, or practising words with my son, it hasn’t happened. So, crack the knuckles and get cracking I go.
Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash