Doing things for over 40 year; 20+ of those on the web. Now federated @nick@whoisnick.com
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Our grandiose lives
We want larger than life stories to remember the simple things I’ve gone off the beaten track for the past couple of posts. And it’s time to get back to Ong and his characteristics of oral cultures. And today, we’re going to look at The noetic role of heroic ‘heavy’ figures and of the bizarre…
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Am I really late?
Oral, literate & postliterate time Somewhere time slipped away on me. Now that I’ve got a moment, it seems like the perfect catalyst to think about how time plays into our postliterate lives. Time is one of these funny things about life. It happens, and you can’t stop it. Days, seasons, lunar cycles, life, growth,…
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The Master & The Apprentice
Old world relationships & social structures When I originally set out thinking about the social implications of orality and the postliterate world, I immediately imagined a series of old-world relationships. Ones that still exist today, though maybe overlooked or under-utilized, or ones that may have been forgotten or no longer seemed “relevant.” Here’s an example:…
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The Literaty
Literacy will always have a place Between the years 550 and 700, something interesting happened. With the fall of Rome, we stopped speaking and using Latin. What’s more, languages shifted and mutated in various parts of the world and by 700 the common person couldn’t speak it, nor did they have anyone in their lives that had…
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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 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…