#aliterate

…I’ve kinda given away the ending.

But let’s rewind.

Next up in my ever continuing exploration of Ong and Oral Culture

Conservative or traditionalist

It’s fair to say oral cultures moves slowly. Things were moving at a pretty chill pace until that good old day in 1450 when Gutenberg turned on the press.

Ong says it’s all because of mental load. An oral culture doesn’t have room for new things. It takes a long time for new things to stick. Without the written word to do the repeating, new idea’s must be all word of mount, and repeated at nauseam.

An oral mind relies heavily on patterns and repetition. On sticking with the old things because the new things hurt.

“Oral cultures do not lack originality of their own kind”

When I first read that, I thought maybe his literate bias was showing. I’ve said if before, Ong does a very good job at staying unbiased towards orality in his Orality and Literacy. Maybe it was faltering a bit here.

Ong is also very delicate in his use of words. He didn’t say “oral cultures do not lack originality”, he says, “… originality of their own kind.”

Some technology seems to come out of nowhere. You think… holy smokes where did this come from: ovens, fridges, cars, planes, computers, quantum computers.

Maybe the type of originality of an oral culture is through variations on a theme; slowly changed over time until the invention or “new” thing seems inevitable.

Scissors – take two swords and connect them so they cut up and down at the same time.

The sandwich – We have meat. We have bead. Why aren’t they together?

Where have the new things gone?

And we’re back to the “same same but different”

Music, fashion, movies, are all feeling like a repetitive loop of what’s come before. The Spaceballs 2 teaser I posted previously echos this sentiment.

Do you think cars are all ending up looking the same?

Logo’s all look the same?

Websites all feeling the same?

Maybe it’s because our collective oral mind. We’re loosing the cognitive load to take something too different.

The million user test

Buy look how fast we signed up for ChatGPT or Threads!

Ong points out,

In oral tradition, there will be as many minor variations of a myth as there are repetitions of it, and the number of repetitions can be increased indefinitely

Is ChatGPT really much different than ICQ? Is Netflix so far off from TV? When twitter came out, was it so foreign? You used to send it text messages.

I don’t think it’s that we won’t all flock to the latest “thing”. I just question our future appetite for true novelty. Newer is ok. Newest if fine. New New? I’m feeling doubtful.

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…

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.

Mnemonic or a Meme?

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?

• New phone, who ‘dis?
• Keep calm and …
• Netflix and chill
• Yada yada
• Bye, Felicia

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.

A What now? Interlocutor.

“Can you say that in a sentence?”

“So Eugene already had a leg up—an interlocutor could explain away any failed communication.”

• a person who takes part in a conversation or dialogue.
• a person who questions; interrogator.

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?

Shaka, when the walls fell

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.

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?

Into Literacy

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 ).

• 1650, UK & Netherlands have roughly 50% literacy
• 1750, Sweden reached 50%
• 1850, France
• 1850, the Americas start with 80% literacy rates
• 1900, Italy was shy of 60%
• 1900, the Netherlands  (90%) and America (89%) had the highest literacy rates in the world
• 1960’s, finally the world literacy rate hit 50%

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.

Into Post Literacy

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.

• < Level 1 (0-175) – Basic vocabulary. Little to no understanding of sentence of paragraph structure.
• Level 1 (176 – 225) – Short, non-continuous texts. Ability to add basic personal information in documents.
• Level 2 (226 – 275) – Medium length, continuous, non-continuous, or mixed textx. Can paraphrase. Low-level inferences.
• Level 3 (276 – 325) – Dense or lengthy, continuous, non-continuous, mixed, or multi- page texts. Can construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses.
• Level 4 (326 – 375) – Integrate, interpret, or synthesize multi-page complex texts. Identify and understand non-central idea(s). Interpret or Evaluate subtle evidence-claim or persuasive discourse.
• Level 5 (376 – 500) – Integrate information across similar and contrasting ideas or points of view. Aware of subtle, rhetorical cues and to make high-level inferences.

So where does the world stand? The national average is 267 (level 2).

• 296, Japan
• 288, Finland
• 270, US
• 250, Italy

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)

My Take: Aliterate oral culture is back

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.

Sources:

• PIAAC Technical Standards and Guidelines.
• OECD PIAAC International report
• NCES – What PIAAC Measures.
• Stats Can (note: conflicts a little with NCES FastFacts)
• Our World In Data – Literacy.
• UN Stats – SDG Indicators 2019
• Reading Facts – The Reading Agency