Asking all my life.
It’s that time of year! I do Movember every year for their support of mental health. I suggest and those i love suffer. And let’s be honest Men don’t speak up, and we should.
I like to keep people on their toes and mix up the how to watch along. I try to not bombard with daily feeds, but I also think it’s fun to see the progress over time. This year, I’m using pixelfed.
As always, please donate here.
That’s all I’ve got. Time for some more coffee ☕
Turkey Weekend 🇨🇦🦃 has drained me so all you get for weeknotes today is a list:
See you next time ✌️.
We’re finally at the final attribute of Ong’s Psychodynamics of Orality. Even though he didn’t outline it last, I think it ties it all together.
The Interiority of Sound
Outside of sight, sound is a major sense for us. Sure there are 3 other senses, but come on…
Optical illusions can fake out our vision with perspective, relativity, reflection, translucence, or vapor our eyes can loose focus and be tricked. And when they are sound can inform us to fill in the gap.
You can echo locate with a game of Marco Polo. You can get a sense of what’s inside something simply by knocking on it – determine how hollow or dense an object is; uncover it’s insides like finding studs on a wall . The sound, and lack of sound, can give a sense of feeling based on ambient noise, resonance, or reverb, to give a “feeling” or maybe even alert to danger.
With instruments you can hear its make up of materials far away through it’s tone – the smooth and deep from the wood in a violin vs the sharp grit from the metals in a saxophone. You can hear quality, like the use of more modern, dense, plastics in vinyl records today verses the junk vinyl used as the Medium declined.
Listen to someone long enough, and you can even get a better sense of who they are. You might start to understand them more than you thought.
Reading, in contrast, is a solitary act even in a crowded room. It’s your voice inside your head echoing the words you’re seeing. Their thoughts become your thoughts. Whereas in oral traditions, you always remember the person who taught you.
“Sight isolates, sound incorporates,” as, Ong, put’s it.
However, Ong’s book was written before the internet and long before the smart phone – standing on a train car watching reams of people streaming music or video’s, all listening in isolation with their headphones intending to be a barrier.
One could argue that these devices can transform sound to isolate like a good book. We even have noise cancelling technology to further block out the world around.
However, it’s not call “sound cancelling” and, I think there’s a nuanced difference in our postliterte society between sound and noise. I think we have become acutely aware of the difference.
Technology made walking through a park more an act of blocking out and ignoring Bluetooth and cell phone speakers. It has added stop lights repeating “wait, wait”; tills with beeps and blips; musak; audio branding; gas pump ads; AIs calling us on the phone; even the wires in our walls hum all around us.
Our world is now very very noisy.
Sound is permissive. We focus in and must block out everything else to hear it.
And because of that we are pickier now than ever on who we listen to, we are also pickier who we communicate with.
And we have technological choices on all of it.
Remember back to Orality and the Sacral.
There are profound feelings of vulnerability and judgement. That there is a preference on the written word or recorded image. The ability to capture many takes, revise and rewrite to come across in the most flattering light.
Radio students are scared to give live interviews. Afraid of being seen by the other person. Questioning who’s really doing the interview?
Live, immediate sound is now one the most profound experiences. Live communication has a feeling of exposure and rawness.
We even have running gags and jokes on the topic, how we no longer answer random calls or turn off all the lights in the house and duck when someone dares knock on our door.
While headphones create a cocoon against audio interaction trying to immerse in their own experience, what initially may look like isolation, I think is incorporation. Perhaps a deep connection, just not with the person next to them – instead maybe to other Swifties, or SmartLessers. The sound they are embraced in is just for another community that you, or I, aren’t a part of.
The fact that we protect ourselves so much from “noise” is evidence of how powerful sound is to our core. As we progress in our postliterate society, I think we’re going to defend and protect it even more.
Is this one of the many reasons people don’t want to go back to the office; why headphones are status symbols; why concerts are so expensive; why radio kids don’t want to do interviews; why people aren’t listening to each other?
Speaking of powerful audio communities, Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ album release party “movie” was a 3-day theatrical experience and crush it over traditional movies making over $30 million domestically. It was a collective experience.
‘Tis the season where my child wants me to be some advanced cosplay outfit maker. I admit I like it a bit, but oh the cardboard! This year sounds pretty advanced. We’ll see what kind of blueprints he makes at 7.
Should I teach him AutoCAD? Probably a bad idea, considering I tried to teach him to play Minecraft with a computer keyboard and mouse on the weekend so he could play the “real” poisonous potato; it did not go well.
As anyone who’s read my previous weeknotes, you may have noted my woes with AP WP and my new host. It’s an on again off again curse of a relationship. It was working, then it wasn’t. Smashing head to table, plugins on and off and on and off. Now all caching plugins are off and other under the hood plugins are in use… it seems to be… better. We’ll see what lasts.
Still working towards that AIPMM CPM designation. Slowly but surely watching those percents go up and up every day.
Let’s see….
Well, that’s all I’ve got. Typing for typing-sake on this one.
L8rs
“That rug really tied the room together… man”
So after being on the web for a very long time, I’m working to get me all certified. Product Manager certified.
So – let the schooling being. I’m going through ProductSide
As the quote says, it does tie the room together. I’ve got a little of this, and a little of that in my tool belt. PMs need to straddle multiple perspectives and skills. A bit of design, a bit of tech, a bit of marketing and a bit of biz, all with the objective of making products better.
Every company I’ve worked for at some point let’s me be me, and I mash, assimilate info, and create: MVPs, POCs, experiments, pilot programs, and more.
Unfortunately, for me, I’ve never been with a company with an official Product team. Hopefully an AIPMM CPM certification can open that door. 🤷
It was a bit of a learning curve, but for the most part it’s done. I’m now hosting on Canadian soil.
I started with my previous host in 2006! Before I say 15+, but it was more like almost 20! Boy oh boy the mess in the wake of that many years.
It was a reminder to always clean my toys when I’m done playing with them and what happens if you don’t. It was also a very good exercise to purge, and prep to purge.
Too many domains I’m squatting on that I thought, at the time where cool, but now look back, I set them to “Don’t Auto Renew”.
One last task to take me about a year, is to transfer domains when I need. Paying to transfer all at once is a bit out of budget.
In the process, and for lessons. I did have one problem with porting ActivityPub over. Seems my new host adds an Nginx cache to sites to give ’em a bit of a boost. However… turns out it broke this site and ground it all to a halt.
Seems unless configured specifically using Nginx cache doesn’t like to swap content types. So when a page is rendered as HTML one moment, and then asked to render again as JSON-LD for activity pub, things go a bit off the rail.
Sadly that means I had to turn this feature off with my host, as they currently don’t allow for individual customization at the moment. But happily that I could, and this site in all it’s ActivityPub glory, can continue.
A while back I mentioned about getting AP working for Statamic, and now that my hosting move is complete, back to this pet project. Keep you posted in my next weeknotes.
Perhaps this, and this alone, is the one psychodynamic of an oral culture that no matter how I think of it, play and ponder, I don’t think a postliterate society will likely ever have.
Words are not Signs
Even when glanced quickly, the aliterate can still take simple phonetic symbols to translate words: “Stop”, “Play”, “Pause”, “Danger”
Around the world we are inundated with words as signs on almost every device, ad, package and surface.
No matter how aliterate someone is, they can read they just choose not to. When we dictate texts and emails, we clearly indicate our understanding of punctuation, “comma, exclamation point!” And we always proof read the message before hitting send.
Will there be a day when and “S” becomes more like a strange latin character or hieroglyph? Will the letters of “STOP” only be looked at as a series of strange curves and lines, like the octagon they sit on? The shape alone translating in the minds eye not to stop, but “halt” or “cease” or “end”.
Who knows, that’s a far future that I can’t even imagine.
Something I found very interesting, Ong outlined an interesting design choice of printers as print media bacome dominant and literacy hit the tipping point. He show it as evidence of auditory dominance in the printer and their audience.
“Sixteenth-century title pages very commonly divide even major words, including the author’s name, with hyphens presenting the first part of a word in one line in large types, and the latter in smaller type…” Here’s the example.
However, what’s so different from that and any of these?
We are just as careless about letter placement and brake up words all around. We excuse this for design aesthetics, but we can still easily stitch the pieces together. Perhaps as when orality phased out, it’s evidence of the return of auditory dominance?
It’s been a bit, but I wanted to wait till I moved my web host first. Now that that is done, let get back to it, shall we?
So… where were we in our exploration of Ong’s psychodynamics of orality?
Last time we were looking at the Verbomotor Lifestyle. I wrapped up with some discovery around kids not wanting to talk, which at first seems to contradict my theory a bit.
My radio teacher did get back, we’re going to talk more, but for the moment he shared this observation, which I’ve paraphrased.
There are profound feelings of vulnerability and judgement. That there is a preference on the written word or recorded image. The ability to capture many takes, revise and rewrite to come across in the most flattering light.
It makes me think of another psychodynamic:
Ong outlines that the spoken word and community become revered in a way.
He explains that the Hebrew word dabar means word and also event. Because the spoken word is an event to be cherished.
In Christianity, God never writes to anyone, he speaks. The the sermon is always out loud and spoken.
In fantasy fiction like The Lord of the Rings or The Kingkiller Chronicle, authors have picked up on this long standing sentiment, that there is this long time understood magic in the spoken word.
Perhaps, the newer aliterate generations are understanding this more than we realize.
Sacred things do give a sense of “the big feels”, the awe, and to some nervousness. Sacred things have that feeling of importance. I’ve heard many say, if it wasn’t important you wouldn’t be nervous.
Back to dabar. In our world of technology, a true event is an immediate, live, event. YouTube video’s and podcasts aren’t “events” until they are streaming live. Concerts, plays, presentations, all events, live, right now.
Orality is intertwined with ephemeral; immediacy; presence; the present.
And perhaps it’s technology alone, or more aliterate technology that understands the profound weight of the moment. That anything can be modified or updated so long as it’s not in the present. Even a small lag time to add a filter, or a few seconds to delete a post or bleep it out is a bit “safer”.
This week’s notes are more like a to-do:
I started with the simple sites. And I’m just about to start with the more complex, like this one.
I might go dark.
I have no idea what moving a WordPress site does to the ActivityPub plugin. We’ll see. 🤞
See you on the other side.