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.
Broken Words
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?
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:
Orality, community and the sacral
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.
The new sacral
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”.
The Handshake – the kind of handshake that doesn’t end till the negotiation is over. The kind of handshake that’s a dance of business. The kind that someone judges characters with. Not only words. I think that type of handshake is a great symbol of verbomotor.
While Ong doesn’t lay it out specifically, verbomotor is words with action.
To the literate observer, it ends up looking like a lot of unnecessary talking. To the oral one, it’s the proper back and forth to uncover real meaning.
Ong uses a specific story based on a visitor to Cork, Ireland, a region in a country where it’s though to have “massive residual orality.”
“[A] visitor saw a Corkman leaning against the post office. He went up to him, pounded with his hand on the post office wall next to the Corkman’s shoulder, and asked ‘Is this the post office?’ The Corkman was not taken in. He looked at the questioner quietly and with great concern: ‘ ‘Twouldn’t be a postage stamp you were lookin’ for, would it?’”
It wasn’t treated as a simple yes or no answer. There was no aggressive “what’s it to you?”. The response was a carefully thought and a legitimate question to a question.
The answer to which would be very revealing on wants and needs from the person asking.
Words without Action
Maybe if it was a question on it’s own, the result may have been simpler? The fact that the visitor needed to pound, or touch the building is what gave rise to a that specific call and response.
Only through radio or podcast can we imagine words without action. They are rhetorical: no answer or response required, unless extremely compelled and moved.
Words without action require no action, not even mental storage. They are here, herd and likely forgotten.
In radio school we were taught to always activate the “theater of the mind.” That’s where the connection is.
With verbomotor, it is. Only with theater of the mind can you imagine a corollary action. If you can connect the words being spoken to an action there’s a higher chance the message is retained and acted upon.
A note about written action words
You might be thinking, but books are full of descriptive actions. That’s what makes them great! You can read the words and the actions… that should be verbomotor enough, right?
Let’s callback to this post about “close to the human lifeworld“. About the Iliad and all the physical language to engage oral minds.
The use of the physical words were to appeal to transitioning from orality into literacy. However transitioning away from literacy, words are just more abstractions. Written words are an abstraction from the spoken word which is an abstraction from the real thing. Oral minds abhor abstraction.
Action without Words
Now, if someone pounded a wall next to my shoulder, I imagine my response to be a more emotional or visceral: confusion, curiosity, defensive. Then again, I’m writing an argument for orality, which means while I am intrigued, my oral residue is likely lower than The Corkman.
The action alone without words was simply an action – neutral or, at most, inconclusive.
It’s why video’s with transcripts or words popping up in your face are more effective. On mute, or when scrolling and the video sound is default off, words are needed to connect the action and stop us in our tracks, to hopefully stop scrolling for a moment. Otherwise, it’s just some other flashing media vying for our attention and being ignored.
Subtitles are kind of OK.
Here’s where I think we come across our first decent aliterate twist.
We have the choice of subtitles. Given visual action, we are fine to read what’s being said. Or at the least keywords of what’s being said. So long as it’s in sync.
Netflix seems to be doing just fine with subtitles. Take a look at Squid Games and other international show hits.
We seem to caption everything lately. Even the subtlest accent and viewers turn on subtitles. Which at first could be an argument that I’ve been totally wasting my time. However, it’s on context, it’s ephemeral, it’s in precise and synchronous replacement of audio
But kids don’t want to talk on the phone
Here’s something I heard the other day in a podcast , made by my old radio school instructors.
It raised a conundrum I want to understand more. The episode I was listening to noted, students are terrified of picking up the phone to talk to people.
It is kinda true. No one wants to call anyone anymore.
Is it the cold call? The faceless phone call? The pone call where no one can see any actions?
Words without action. Words without any context to even imagine action. In some cases not even the ability to imagine the face saying the words… this is making them afraid?
To sum up, with an over simplification, Ong’s observation is that literary memorization is verbatim while oral memorization, although claimed verbatim, is more or less general ball park.
Your modern image of memorization might involve hunching over books and queue cards. Repeating phrases and trying to translate them into your mnemonic device of choice. The goal: precise repetition.
Those who’ve tried to memorize any Shakespeare might have that daunting feeling.
Ong focused in on poetry, plays, and sonnets – all things minstrel. An area that would have some of the oldest documents where a select few would try and store it, while also having a deep history of oral traditions.
He discovered that oral memorization, is unexpectedly different, while really good at mimicry it isn’t exact after all.
It’s close. It can even fudge complexity, but when broken down there are differences: word variations, name changes, passage alterations. And when looked at very closely the memorization breaks down more into patterns, no matter how complex. The keys to unlock were more like linguistic Lego to mix and match that could create long sonnet’s with complex rhyming structures almost infinitely.
At the heart of it, is an ability to memorize the general structure, or pattern. Like a joke you tell, so long as you make sure to get the punchline.
This form of memorization is not unlike nature in a way. Trees, shells, snowflakes, fingers – all are pretty close. Yet, when you break them down they aren’t exactly the same.
Literate Memorization
As literacy took hold, we started to offload memorization onto technology. Scrolls & books galore! This memory was more or less published. Memorization became our strong rigid ability to repeat like a printing press in our mind.
Our literary binary mind loved it. Letters, words and sentences in exact order and location with proper punctuation.
And then of course to store all of that, the literary mind does what a literary mind does, creates systems to store it.
Verse numbers, Dewey Decimal Systems, catalogues, and file folders to look it all up, reference and find. More systems, libraries and librarians to be custodians and assist.
Our “memory” started using physical space to assist. Example: Page 33, like about a third of the book in, and on the page it was the paragraph above that blue and pink graph.
And then came binary digitization. We continued to file things into millions of folders, suffixed with indicators of data types ( doc, xls, txt, exe ). Oh the folders!
Then the web came, and folders became so much more! Prefixed with protocols and domains with subdomains and even more suffixes; protocols and slashes and query strings! We offloaded more and more information and memory. And the systems became more an more complex.
Our memorization was a badge of time and effort. A reward for an exhaustive journey to capture it.
Current Memorization??
Then came the search engine.
This may be the single catalyst for the end of classic literate memorization. Memorization simplified and completely offloaded onto technology.
While librarians and search catalogues use to do the work, now a single text field was all that was needed.
Combine this with the smart phone, where this single field is available at all times anywhere you go… and well, off load away. Why store those silly little facts in your mind?
Then we didn’t even have to type anymore.
Now we can have even more complex discussions with AI.
All those complex literary systems wiped under the rug. They still exist in complex code and LLMs and algorithms on the hardware that runs it all, somewhere in the cloud.
But, in the end what did it do?
There is no memorization
With all that information we’ve offloaded now at your finger tips, there’s no need to really memorize anything. The only time you really need it is short term, i.e. you have a test coming up, or want to impress someone for a first date. But long term… purged.
There’s a million versions
As we’ve uploaded, the cost has become incredibly cheap. Anyone can post minor variations of anything online. And boy oh boy do they. Variations have become a game of whack-a-mole and cease and desist letters. Each one having it’s validity scrutinized and questioned… even called “fake”.
And all the while, searchable and usable. It’s a full time job knowing exactly what’s real. But you know which version you believe is, so go with it.
Precision is out the door
And just like that, we don’t need to know the little facts anymore. We can ball park it, and when we need that precision of memorization… look it up.
The only thing we really need to know is how to ask.
“Generative” Memorization
Ya – that’s a tongue-in-cheek heading for sure.
So… Oral Memorization is about generalized patterns; about using systems to unlock and almost generate the facade of precise memorization. It’s close, and that was good enough.
And our current way of Memorization? It about generalized searches; about using technology to re-discover or download short term which gives the facade of precise memorization. It’ close, and that’s good enough.
Both of these are generative. The details don’t really matter and It’s all about the gist and the tools to get there.
A few extra notes
“But it is exact!”
Something I found kind of interesting that was skimmed over. Ong quickly noted that those using Oral Memorization swore up and down that they always performed something exactly the same every way. That there version was the same as everyone else’s. And yet, when in actuality it wasn’t.
Maybe this is because oral culture is coupled with an agonistic nature? Maybe it’s the loss of objectivity? Neither likely won’t admit fallibility. Maybe there’s something else…
But it is fascinating how there’s a strong ones belief in truth is.
The Literaty
This entire topic is about general patterns. In any pattern, there’s anomalies and outliers. I’ve always ball parked it to about 2% – though again, big give or take depending.
2% of any general group is expected to be high performers or low performers.
So in that belief- I don’t think everyone will be like this. There will always be those that are more skeptical, analytical, more driven by precision, able to memorize things in ways I don’t understand. The Cultural Development: It’s Cultural and Social Foundations study indicates it could be as high as 15%.
I jokingly call it The Literaty, ( emphasis on the “ah” – li·ter·ah·tee ). Though in my imagining of our aliterate ( oral ) future, will this group become more be secretive or stay public opposition to what’s happening in the world? I don’t know, after all this is all a theory.
According to Ong, an oral culture “must conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or less reference to the human lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective worlds to the more immediate, familiar interactions of human beings.”
That’s a long winded way of saying, if it’s not real, or more specifically, not real to me, I’m not going to get it.
Oral minds don’t like abstract.
Ong, then proceeds to look at a really old play/book called the Iliad and the many examples of using metaphors that involve physicality such as “draw on”, “gather upon”, “embark“, …. Where the narrator uses this linguistic devise to keep the audience mentally moving with the plot.
The physical language, is intended to keep an oral culture somewhat engaged.
Side note: Why the old book? Because the older the writing, the closer to primary orality the person who wrote may have been. It’s like asking your grandmother to tell you about the internet. While not exact, the language used or phrasing, would show mental patterns that proceeded it, or when it was truly foreign.
Ong’s ultimate point, is a oral mind abhors the abstract
There’s loads of examples in the study that support this idea. Mostly oral minds won’t infer and even refuse to categorize or theorize something they’ve never experienced. Even guessing what someone would think of an outcome was balked at.
On oral mind: “Sure I could theorize why someone wears a red hat, but what’s the point because I don’t know anyone who wears red hats.“
De-abstracting into our lifeworld
So how are we de-abstracting things and bringing them into out human lifeworld? I Immediately can come up with 3 things
YouTube how-to’s
Ong outlines that that this not-relevant-to-me-like thinking extends to to-do lists and how-to manuals. That they would make no sense without seeing or experiencing the actions for oneself.
I wasn’t so sure about that. But then I started thinking, when was the last time I “read” a how-to?
I can’t. My wife repeats those TikTok recipe video’s over and over when making something new.
Me, I had an opportunity to watch my family, and my brother, or from time to time the food network. I always imagine myself as the them. Watching their hands move or techniques to stir and flip. Like I am their apprentice with them, watching.
The only thing I read is the ingredients and rough timelines in between. Oh the scrolling and scrolling I skim on these blogs that hide the actual recipe miles and miles down on the post.
Is this that oral mind kicking in? Or the aliterate one… stop the prose for the love of all things!
Resume’s and the Interview
Those who know me, know I’m in a transition period of my life. But what jumped out to me related to this is …
The resume is an abstract representation of my work life.
So how do businesses convert that abstract to life? How do they cut the abstract?
More specifics – I’ve found over the years the need for more and more specificity, more concrete proof of knowledge with specific metrics to “let us draw upon” experience.
More interviews. – It used to be one maybe at most three, but it’s looking likethat number is increasing and they are getting harder and longer. If you pass the resume, then everyone related to your new job, needs to feel buy in and comfort and the only real way, is to bring you into their lifeworld. Which of course means… more interviews.
The real-ification of Disney
Disney is on a big push to make “real” all of their classics. The driver of this could be the economics, or the copyrights, or a million other reasons. At the end they wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t resonating with their audience. Any why is it resonating?
Cartoons aren’t real. They are abstractions of the human lifeworld. The older the cartoon, the more abstract. Newer computer animation have at least some basis on real world physics, older hand drawn animation are more interpretative movements.
And it’s now not just Disney, my kids are super excited to see the real-ification of How To Train A Dragon.
How this applies to my real world
I’m sure there’s other examples I’ll think of over time.
But to end this little exploration off, is to bring it all back to what it means for us. News.
News contains a bunch of things that aren’t in my world: cities and streets I’ve never been to; cultures and people I don’t know about; food I’ve never heard of or tasted; situations I would never in a million years see myself in.
If my oral brain were to be exposed of to any news that isn’t in my human lifeworld, I wouldn’t get it. It wouldn’t stick. I may even think it’s fake.
Wait… have you seen “Italian Brainrot”?
It was Marshal McLuhan’s birthday recently, and in homage, I’m looking at a strange “meme” or art form my kids love. McLuhan referred to art as a DEW…
Distant Early Warning system, that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it
And Italian Brainrot has to be a distant early warning; a commentary on what is and what isn’t in our human lifeword, pushed to an extreme.
It’s this strange mashup of reality. A generative AI interpretation of what could really happen if you take two random things to combine them: A ballerina and a cappuccino, a shark and Nike sneakers, a monkey with a banana body. The list goes on – have fun searching up all the characters, I know my mind was a little blown, and still is a bit by this one.
