Who is Nick?

Asking all my life.

Month: February 2021

  • And on and on and on…

    A characteristic of oral culture

    It’s time for the next review of one of Ong’s characteristics of an Oral culture.

    Additive rather than subordinative

    Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

    At the heart of it, Oral cultures avoid subordinate thought. There is no real order per se but a series of “and”s.

    Joe went to sleep. And Joe plowed his field. And Joe drank a cup of coffee. And Joe ate dinner. And Joe walked to the store.

    What order was any of that?

    To an oral culture – does it really matter?

    Based on A.R. Lauria’s Cognitive Development, it could be based on an oral mind’s ability to deduce and infer. Without relevant experience, it refuses the question. Here is one of many examples they posed to oral people:

    All precious metals do not rust. Gold is a precious metal. Does it rust or not?

    What the study founds was pretty fascinating. Out of those without any relevant experience, most (85%) were unable to or flat out wouldn’t solve the question posed. They didn’t care, thought the question was stupid or was dumbfounded why anyone would ask. It made had no relevance to them and their situation.

    Of people who did have some experience, for example, had seen a piece of gold, they didn’t solve the questions by a landslide, only 60%. There were still subjects that refused. Only after being given additional, conditional assumptions of practical situations would the others, with experience, solve the question posed.

    Interesting side note: Back to the group surveyed without any experience. Did you do the math? Not everyone refused. 15% could work through the inference without help. Perhaps this is nature? Perhaps this is the spice of life? Take a read through Who moved my cheese?

    And then…?

    In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman brought up the “And now this…” culture. One that is ok with non-linear experiences. The phrase taken from newscasts outlines our new ability to detach from linear experiences. To switch seamlessly from graphic violence to a feel-good comedy without missing a beat. All it takes is a click of the button, and voila, new feelings.

    Today we have additive experiences every day. When you find a new blog, do you start at the beginning? Facebook posts, tweets, grams, snaps, stream after stream, is there a semblance of order or hierarchy to them? No.

    What’s more interesting is in some of these “streams” of additive moments, they remove any sequential nature – with algorithms bringing to the forefront popular posts from friends weeks ago folded into the present.

    Now, what about binge-watching? That’s linear. Right? There may be a linear and subordinate nature to it, but only in the show itself. What about the context of the world? Where you are in your own experience might not be aligned with your friends. We have learned to remove expectations or assumptions of order onto others – they may be ahead or behind.

    And because we can no longer have any expectation of order, we treat each other as beings of additive experiences.

    Jeff ate dinner. And Jeff watched Game of Thrones. And Jeff shared his pictures at the park. And Jeff tweeted that meme. And Jeff texted Joe. And Jeff slept.

    What order was any of that?

    Does it really matter?

    Originally posted on Substack

  • Homeostatic

    Same, same but different?

    More of Ong’s characteristics of an oral society.

    Photo by 浮萍 闪电 on Unsplash

    “[O]ral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance.”

    Have you wondered why it’s taken humanity so long to progress?

    Unless it has a practical function, most oral people will defy further thought1.

    It may have been systemic or practical to slough memories off. The effort required to learn and keep useless knowledge takes away from survival: from plowing and planting, from hunting or being hunted, from preparing and planning the long winter.

    But now – we slough for different reasons. It’s easier.

    “Oh – what was that movie with so and so that had that guy with the horse?” IMDB.com.

    “Hey, Google, what does a whale sound like?”

    The amount of input we are taking in is too much. The amount of information is piling and piling on top of us all. Add to that, the amount of information we need to sift to find the relevant information. Or the information to inform us if the information we used to find the information is real information? Get it?

    No wonder we slough.

    However, in offloading, Ong highlights an equilibrium that happens. We become more like our peers and wish things to stay the same. Ask google what homeostasis means.

    Not too thrilled

    Let me start by saying I’m not happy with some areas that this idea can go. Here lays a pile of darkness on fire on my doorstep. And I feel it’s easy to stomp right into it. But I’m going to choose not to. You can stop reading here and go there on your own. There’s enough out there I’m sure.

    So instead I’m going to talk about a possibility I hope for, given we’re not the same as we were.

    Homeo – similar

    What is similar?

    If we are moving into the postliterate and our oral sensibilities are coming back and, if Orality doesn’t generalize and, if Orality is fluid, let me ask again.

    What is similar?

    Please let it be something else. I want the postliterate idea of this to change with all the options of so many beautiful and diverse commonalities.

    I don’t want homeo-algorithms creating systems that funnel us, and label us and lead us into similar ideologies and views. I don’t want my internet to be different than your internet. Yet, with the mountain of “sloughing,” programmers and companies feel like they have no other choice to get us what we “want.”

    Instead, let’s go back and think of this:

    All of them are Romans. Rome had so much diversity. Heck, they were polytheistic! “A pantheon of gods and goddesses, along with their own religions and rituals.2”

    It stands to reason that they were kinda cool with not all believing in the same thing, or looking the same way. And at the same time, they were all Romans.

    Statis – standing still

    Read Who Moved My Cheese. On a good day, most of us don’t like change. There’s a preference for staying with what works.

    And yet, given that we have gone through a boom of change over the past 500 years like no other.

    But I’ve always had a problem with the idea that this growth we’re in is sustainable. We have the audacity to believe that we are capable of exponential growth in perpetuity. And yet every night we go to sleep. Night comes. Winter comes. Rest is required for life.

    I think this pandemic has opened our eyes to this. And funny how out of all of this, slowly recovering, the internet is a buzz on “social audio.”

    An oral culture requires our mouths to rest. Our minds to rest. To consume the words from someone else. Oral cultures take their time. They stand still. They prefer it.

    Perhaps this is where AI and the future of offloading onto technology open new ways of being. Is our postliterate future one where we learn to stand still – but in a self-driving car?

    Homeostasis isn’t opposed to change

    The thing about homeostasis is it’s a process that wants stability in a system for survival. Nowhere does that mean it’s opposed to change. Ong chose his words well. When things are good – sure, things slow down. Yet it’s also fast to find new stability and adapt. 200 years is all it took after the fall of Rome to fracture into so many different languages.

    Change isn’t easy. Imagine water becoming gas. In flux, the change looks dramatic and violent. And, I think, we’re metaphorically deep in a boiling time. Hopefully, our oral sensibilities are what will help us adapt and find the right equilibrium on the other side.

    I have yet to read it, but a previous professor of mine gave me an intriguing summary of Douglas Biber’s Variation across speech and writing. He paraphrased “when we have lots of time, we tend to develop texts that are prose-like; when we don’t, we tend to develop texts that are speech-like, without respect to whether the text is written or spoken.”

    When we have the cognitive wherewithal we take it. When we don’t we scream “look out!” And perhaps that’s where we are in our transition?

    If was McLuhan is right in the 60’s when he said we were already into this new era, perhaps we’re only about 70 years into this postliterate transition.

    130 years left to go to see how we adapt.

    Originally posted on Substack

    1. Remember that 15%? ↩︎
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytheism ↩︎
  • Once a rock always a rock?

    Once a rock always a rock?

    Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it never was.

    In the world of ecology, things are never the same, only evolving. In my intro to this project, I talked about the story of the wolves of Yosemite. 14 wolves had amazingly positive results, but is Yosemite’s ecology the exact same as it was before everything when south? No. It can never be.

    And this is the underlining principle of – once you go literate, orality is gone forever. You can never go back. All the thought leaders are conscientious when they use “orality” after the written word. They get very intricate in their choices of words and phrases: primal orality, oral sensibilities, oral residue, postliterate.

    Lately, in my mind, I’ve begun to think about orality and literacy in a geological sense. Imagine Orality and Literacy in an ever-evolving process of erosion and sedimentation. Mixing to make different forms. Never again the original form. Requiring a lot of time and energy to mutate.

    So, of course, it’s not orality, in the truest sense. The academics are spot on to avoid the word. On the other side, my non-academic says – stop your fancy words! It’s a rock.

    To the laymen, it’s a rock, a cloud, a tree. For the masses to truly take on a concept, I feel we need a generic “word.” For all the colours of the rainbow, the average person still can say red, blue, green. I want orality to have the same understanding.

    But Orality doesn’t generalize.

    However…. this is where my literate mind starts having a small temper tantrum.

    I’ve been struggling with an interesting and challenging thought. In purest orality, in what I’ve been reading, there are no generalizations. The ability to create a group of “X” goes out the window.

    Everything has a unique and contextual quality void of the need for broad strokes. It’s no wonder why we wonder why there seem to be countless names of the same animal in different phases of life, why there could be 12 words for rain or snow in some cultures. It may be because, in an oral culture, it was unique and required a name unto itself, specific for the context.

    And with this in mind, dialects and the history of language variations start to make a bit more sense.

    In my pride of pattern recognition, when I create a view of my world, it’s worse than never the same again, it was never all the same in the first place.

    What does this mean?

    Simply put, fragmentation. More fragmentation in meaning. More fragmentation in thought. Worse yet, overlapping and unrelated fragmentation of the same things. Different intent and “meaning” for the same thing.

    As technology has been advancing, I think some of this fragmentation is occurring naturally. We’re losing our ability to put things into buckets. It’s dividing and amalgamating— erosion and sedimentation. Here are a few examples:

    • Is Facebook part of the medium of the internet, or a medium unto itself? How do we categorize it across devices? Is Facebook on your phone the same as a browser?
    • What is a podcast? What is this clubhouse app? What is social audio, and what makes these things “different” than audio experiences before?
    • When twitter does roll out their “spaces” to everyone… what does that make them?

    Bye-bye generalizations. What’s more interesting is your Youtube might not be my Youtube. Now imagine that for everyday words like “bank,” or “book,” or “spoke.” The same word – different connotations with unique contextual awareness for each.

    I imagine the fragmentation is going to increase. But unlike previous geographical divisions, it will be a reflection of our community, or probably more like an amalgamation of communities, within this global village.

    Here’s one last example you need to ponder and maybe ask your friends:

    Question: What book did you last read?
    Question 2: Did you actually “read” it, or was it an audiobook?

    Photo by Matthew Kosloski on Unsplash

    Originally posted on Substack

  • The rules are changing

    A coming of age and some insight into the past

    Why should you care about orality?

    This has been a tough question for me. After all, if I can’t answer this, then to put it lightly, what’s the point?

    And then, when talking it out with someone recently, I made a connection.

    Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

    It’s been a couple of weeks, and the chaos that we watched in the United States seems to be dissipating. However, there is still a vast divide that needs to be overcome.

    The rules are changing.

    I’ve brought up Ong and the Cognitive Development study – and at the root, if our oral sensibilities are increasing – the fundamentals of logic change. And if the fundamentals change, the rules of debate change.

    And if you have someone with more literate sensibilities arguing with someone with oral sensibilities? You might as well be speaking a different language. Until we learn what these real differences are, everyone will be yelling into deaf ears on either side.

    I bring up the United States because I wonder if that’s at play in some part of the conflict. Two groups with drastically different sets of rules of debate. The arguments are incomprehensible by the opposition.

    It’s a coming of age story.

    There’s this phrase that I keep hearing over and over, “Yes, but this is new!” In some sense, sure. But in a lot of senses, I don’t think so.

    What I’m wondering is, is this a coming of age story? Are the arrogant teenagers of countries simply taking a step closer to understanding our elders in terms of societies and culture? Putting on suites to go into the world’s workforce and making adult decisions with all the nuances and complexities that only an older society could comprehend.

    I feel it when I leave North America ( Canada for me ). The moment I land in Heathrow, the land, the culture, the cities feel “older” than mine. History seeps out from the walls. No matter how new-aged or foreign, there’s a sense of history for me. And maybe this history comes from these times older than I can comprehend.

    And perhaps with the age of civilization, there is more diversity in sensibilities, oral, literate, other? Or perhaps more relevant examples of when their country was oral? After all, in our “western” history, our North American “countries” have never experienced this, because after all – they didn’t exist in the post-classical ( 400-1500 BCE ) hay day that the rest of the world has.

    Yes, that was a lot of “quotations” there – mainly in recognition of the cultures that were here before all of this – and those cultures struggling today, I feel have a better sense of what’s going on. Maybe one day we’ll learn to be quiet and listen to them.

    My point is, just like teenagers and adults do – we fight over the plight of something new and something old. Throw away what our elders know to only come around in the end and realize both are right.

    Classic rules?

    So if all of this battle is a coming of age, then there are rules to how. And in understanding oral cultures before we will take that step to a solution. I suggest that we all brush off our communication skills in “rhetoric” – you do have those, right? 😬

    You may have noticed that I posed the subtitle as a question – not a statement. It wasn’t a typo.

    While I feel we should brush up and learn more pre-medieval rhetoric – there is also what I think maybe a gap in history, and I’m starting to look to learn more about it—that of the commoner.

    The printing press lowered the barrier of entry into literacy and the written word. Before then, however, it was incredibly high. So high that only a percentage of a percent had access or the wherewithal to be trained or hire trained people. And so what we really know might be skewed to the elite. We have movies about Royalty and knights, about emperors or “previous” lords cast into slavery – but what do we really know about the common man, woman, or child? What persuaded the peasants, serfs, or the freemen in medieval times? What do we know about their sense of debate and logic? How did they debate and come to a common-sense amongst themselves?

    I remembered once being told that while we can make many assumptions and inferences from Shakespearan times, like what the common population was interested in being entertained by, we actually know very little. It wasn’t a real representation of the masses. In sad honesty, it didn’t matter: fear, torment and survival were.

    I hope that’s not where we go again. I hope we get through this postliterate hiccup all intact. If I have a nugget of a provable theory here, there’s some bit of insight into this literacy/orality division that once was.

    Originally posted on Substack