Author: Nick Kempinski

Time has opened up for me; so has my ability to keep focusing on my exploration of Ong’s characteristics of an oral culture.

Today’s target is

Aggregative rather than analytic

Linguistic Formulas

“The elements of orally based thought and expression tend to not be so much simple integers as clusters of integers…” He goes on to explain it’s clusters & phrases. His examples are “not the soldier, but the brave soldier not the princess, but the beautify princess.”

Oral cultures tend to be consistent in using consistent descriptive adjectives. Not simply saying a soldier or princess. This doesn’t exclude the opportunity for an alternate adjectives such as, his examples, “braggart soldier” or “unhappy princess” but the default position is this aggregate term and default aggregate repeated over and over until normalized.

These might not really ring so true today in terms of simple descriptive adjectives. However when you expand the language to longer phrases, and acronyms, things start to become interesting.

• YOLO – You only live once
• FOMO – fear of missing out
• MAGA – make america great again
• GOAT – greatest of all time
• BFF – best friends forever
• LMAO – laugh my ass off
• LOL – laugh our loud.
• ROFL – roll on the floor laughing
• PITA – pain in the ass
• TMI – too much information
• NSFW – not safe for work

All of these can be used otherwise yet we don’t.

I could reveal some thing intimate and use alternate words, but I don’t. I say TMI, keeping the phrase intact and crystalized.

Each acronym or phrase cannot be altered. FOLO is not a thing.

… rather than analytic

Now comes the analytic part. For Ong, the argument was simply put that “Without a writing system, breaking up thought – that is, analysis – is a high risk process.” He then drops-the-mic with a quote from Levi-Stauss, “the savage [i.e. oral] mind totalizes.”

Essentially he’s saying that oral thought cannot piece meal a concept. It can not look at something in isolation but must have context, inter-connection, situation, as a whole. Saying “a friend” would be like…

It would be an unfinished sentence to an oral mind and require the formula and some form of aggregate language.

Is that to say, if I say “best friend” would an oral mind place it in the default position and complete the phrase adding “forever”? If I were to mention “laughing” would there be mental chaos because someone isn’t sure if I’m doing it “out loud” or “rolling on the floor” from it?

Perhaps the term itself is negated and ignored? Thinking, “they aren’t really friends because Nick never clarified it was best or forever.” Or, “He didn’t ‘literally’ laugh because he didn’t say it was out loud.”

Maybe for the aliterate a little analysis is allowed? But perhaps not too much.

Welcome back to the exploration of Ong’s characteristics of an Oral Culture. Today, We’re going to tackle…

Empathetic and Participatory Rather than Objectively Distanced

“For an oral culture learning or knowing mean achieving close, empathetic, communal identification with the known… Writing separates the knower from the known.”

Meaning that literacy can give distance and objectivity to a topic, to a perspective, to a way of life.

Reading a book ,the thoughts of someone else meld with our own. We get to wear their skin for a moment in our silence.

Writing, is an externalization of thought. Seeing our words on paper or screen vents them from our interior creating a reflective mirror; a recording – it’s us, but not. Through it, we have the opportunity to be critical of ourselves, like a mirror that lets me be critical of some of my t-shirt choices.

And as we delve into our oral nature… we remove these moments of distance.

We entrench ourselves into thoughts and opinions. We build up walls and listen only to the songs we know, read only the things we already read.

Does it feel like the world is being objective?

I can tell you it doesn’t for me. If feels, to me, that people are hunkering into their camps and doubling down.

We blame social media. That it has given us our rose coloured glasses. It force feeds us biased media & ads base on demographics, personas, geolocation and algorithms. It does so to the point where we don’t see anything outside of our little bubble.

But… perhaps…

Perhaps even if it did, would we choose to see/hear it? Aliterate means we can read ( a little ) and choose not to. We could learn about someone else yet, like reading, choose not to.

Perhaps we are all losing our objectivity to even care?

Debate requires objectivity. Debate requires some sense of distance from a topic to allow ourselves to be open.

Instead, as Ong points out, as an oral culture we start to identify with the known. We become the perspective and anything else, becomes more and more foreign to us.

The Actor

Is the actor ( or performer ), the only one who has the capacity and the tools in an oral or aliterate culture to truly step in and out of someone else’s perspective? They have, or are working on the ability to empathize and identify with someone foreign. They walk, talk and even breath like someone else for a moment. The goods ones, in my opinion, push themselves further and further from themselves.

Is that part of our collective fascination and admiration of them?

I’m going to have to go off and ponder that like this for a few moments…