With what’s happened this week in the US, I’m going to focus in on the next characteristic of an oral culture that I think fits the bill. While moments like these have many more moving parts and are much more complex, perhaps there’s something in this one that might be relevant.
I’ve talked about this before, but let’s use it in terms of Ong this time. In his characteristics of an oral cultures he calls this:
Situational rather than abstract.
Oral cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frame of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the human lifeworld
In other words, abstract generalisations go out the window. Inference and logic are illogical. An oral mind will stay rooted in the here and now and won’t even entertain the idea abstraction.
What’s in front of them is the truth. Only what they’ve experienced is the truth. Trying to understand someone or something else is impossible and any exercise to go deeper is irrelevant.
I won’t group like you tell me
In Cognitive Development, It’s Cultural and Social Foundations by A.R. Luria, a fascinating read, they were able to study a pocket of preliterate society as it transitioned into literacy. They asked a lot of interesting questions to see what how they would answer.
Here’s one small example, Ong, outlined. When asking the participants to name shapes, they never used the general name of the shape, instead:
Circle were plates, sieves, moons
Triangles were amulets, fingernails, buckets
Squares were mirrors, doors, apricot drying boards
This study continues to ask them to group even more things: people, situations, trees – and time after time, they refused.
Here’s another test performed. Give someone 4 items ( pictures of the items ), and have them take one away based on any defined grouping
You try:
hammer – saw – log – hatchet
glass – saucepan – spectacles – bottle
bayonet – rifle – sword – knife
But what happened in the majority of cases, preliterate people didn’t, and wouldn’t, group these things with attributes, but by situation. And, they would either deffer, reject, or expand the situation to not exclude anything. Here’s an example of someone, given glass-saucepan-spectacles-bottle, who almost got there:
These three go together, but why you’ve put the spectacles here, I don’t know. Then again, they also fit in. If a person doesn’t see too good, he has to put them on to eat dinner
It wasn’t like they wouldn’t do the exercise, but something was in their mental process was blocking them; they couldn’t do the exercise.
It might then be no surprise what happens when you expand grouping to inferring.
Here’s a very, very simple inference.
If Bobs steals, and stealing is bad, Bob is bad.
To the literate mind, that logic tracks. However, an oral mind will buck up against the whole premise. An oral mind, like asking to group items, won’t even play along. It might even fight you saying “I don’t really know Bob, how can I judge?”
So what does all this have to do with what happened in the US?
Voting.
Voting requires ones ability to infer a candidate is good or bad. Voting requires the ability to create generalisations about someone, their behaviour, their history, their beliefs, to determine if the politician or party would serve your best interest in the future.
If someone looses the ability to make abstractions and generalisations, what happens?
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.
“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.
Had a chat this week with a friend who’s been feeling that movies lately are feeling “over the top”. Like actors are “always on”. Could be, we’ve passed “that line” ( you know the old folks one where you get it, but you don’t get it ). Then we had a good chat about the new need for grandiose, heavy, and bizarre stories.
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.
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
In this, Ong focuses on the tall tale.
The absurd and larger-than-life heroes and characters, in oral cultures, aren’t as grandiose as they seem. Their extreme nature is normalized & memorized over time.
In fiction
It’s easy to see this in fiction, the larger-than-life images and situations we watch. With advancements in technology and CG, there is an almost infinite rabbit hole we can take ourselves.
For the longest time in our literate culture, books have held these grandiose images and stories. Then came the moving pictures. To me, it seems appropriate that some of the earliest attempts to catch our imaginations were centered around flying to the moon or robots and androids.
Most of the great stories have elements of the absurd, bizarre, larger-than-life characters and journey. They stick with you.
And not only that – they have an immediate word-of-mouth quality.
In a story with a million over-the-top moments and characters, when recounted and told to friends and family, if you miss a part, a feature, it still can captivate. The heart of the story travels, even if you don’t know exactly how big or green The Hulk is.
For fiction to be grandiose is expected. What’s really difficult to think about is what’s next: the “real” world.
In Fact
In 15-20 years, what will we remember about these past few years?
It might depend on how many fictionalized movies come out.
Over the past few years, I’ve seen an interesting trend that, I think, relates to this thought – the fictionalization of history.
We are creating & consuming our history more and more through infotainment.
Some could argue that this isn’t real history. That these fictionalized moments are outlandish, over-the-top, made for our viewing pleasure. But maybe at the root, that’s the point. Make history bizarre, outlandish, and grandiose, and maybe we’ll actually remember a nugget of truth?
I’ll admit, my napkin numbers may be reflective more about technology. That the cost to make TV and movies is decreasing, so that overall more content is made in general.
But as I think about it, does this really sway the thought? How many books are there fictionalizing history? Is the history that we learn (not the journalistic history of historians) all but a story?
Perhaps TV & movies, by their very nature, allow for the outlandish, bizarre, dramatized life for our viewing pleasure. They are designed to recreate larger-than-life moments “on the big screen,” which is kinda why we like it.
Now for the kicker
We take in all this over-the-top content, and over time, what happens?
The absurd and outlandish fade, and the nugget of a moral, thought, or feeling remains.
Ong doesn’t oppose this outlandish and bizarre, only that in oral cultures, it was more prominent. He even mentioned that in literature, this continues. However, it’s an artifact of an oral culture. It was heavily required for an oral society as a tool to normalize information through society over time.
The postliterate
The “heroic” heavy figure, the Ong notes, fades with literate culture. Over time there came the “anti-hero,” that “you do not need a hero in the old sense to mobilize knowledge in story form.”
I can’t entirely agree that there was always a heavy hero. In several storytelling traditions, more complex figures took center stage. Take the trickster, the raven, the coyote, Loki, Kaulu, Mercury, the Monkey King, and more.
Let’s look at the gods of Rome or the Norse – sure, magnificent and over the top with grand powers and bizarre and otherworldly experiences – yet flawed and almost human. They were, as Ong might call them, “heavy” figures, but all heroic? No.
How about the Indigenous peoples of North America whose, for lack of a better word, gods were animals and nature itself. “Heavy” figures? Yes. Heroic? Not all.
If Ong was right about needing a hero, though I disagree, perhaps in the postliterate the “heavy” figures are not an external hero, but ourselves. Celebrities taking the limelight. While the rest stage our lives to be bigger, to be more outlandish, to be more grandiose than they are. All with the idea to be seen, and maybe what’s harder to acknowledge, to be remembered.
Though, perhaps this is a transition? Maybe we’re stewing and creating the recipe to create a new set of Roman and Norse-like gods. People who may actually have been real at one point in time, only to have their lives made bizarre and over-the-top from some sort of common societal draw.
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.”
Do you remember the racks and piles of magazines and gamebooks in the washroom? I have a few friends who have a couple of books still in the washroom – but between you and me, I think it’s more for decor and homage to their childhood than actual purpose. The iPhone altered what we did in there.
What have other aspects of everyday life been lost over time as we’ve introduced technology?
As we slide into the postliterate, my thinking is that those lost and forgotten pre-Gutenberg aspects and social structures might creep back into our lives. Imagine if, one day, light bulbs and phones stopped working. My feeling is we would start segmenting our sleep again and bringing back the washroom library.
So come with me and try to think of how society has changed between now and 1450, now further to the year 1000, 0, 100BCE, 1000BCE.
Like I do with my series of Ong’s characteristics of oral society, I’ll start throwing these thoughts out here as we go.
The very first is what I call:
The Master & The Apprentice.
This is a good first step in taking our minds to imagine what life might be like. It’s a relationship that we are all aware of. We call it different things depending on context and industry: student, resident, associate, apprentice, mentee. They may be formal or informal relationships.
Lawyers, Doctors, Artisans, and Trades have formally kept this tradition going and know how vital it is. These industries, and others that follow this process, are aware of a simple truth that our literate-dominated world sometimes forgets.
It’s not just information, but its application, the feeling of it, that is required for understanding, of knowledge.
The written word has detached the emotion and persona of those with knowledge. Imagine reading a manual about anything. Learning from literature alone is learning alone. It is your own voice in your own mind. It’s your own body imagining actions & movements performed.
What orality brings to a lesson, or thought, is the deep-rooted understanding that while you may not remember who said it – you remember it was someone else. Not you. And in that understanding come reverence and respect for the path of information. For the path of history. It’s not just off-hand recognition of Mastery, but the emotional understanding of where it came from.
What does this mean for the future?
I’ve been building up to this idea that we won’t be “illiterate.” I think it will be more likely aliterate. We will still be inundated with information. Though, we might not care.
Yet, remember the literaty from a couple of weeks ago?
In our past, the Master has been the gatekeeper to knowledge and information. The image of the elder confounding the student with seemingly irrelevant tasks and exercises. Then came literacy, and the Master, still with irrelevant tasks, became the librarian with hordes of ancient texts piled high around them. Both of these images are intertwined with experience and age.
The challenge we’ve faced with Masters is that technology has shifted the control of information by reducing the cost to produce and distribute to almost free. It has made the time to gain information irrelevant. The speed of language has allowed the young to garner just as much information. What’s worse is that computers can even assimilate it faster than anyone.
And here’s where we’re starting to see the crack of information alone.
The new Master
The new Master is beyond data alone. New Masters, regardless of age, are arising as those that filter and navigate the infinite for answers. They use it as a foundation to gain insight, filter between folklore and truth, navigate and come out of the other end with true mastery. They are the embodiment of passion and drive for their industry and craft.
Master Penman Jake Weidmann youngest of his kind; one of twelve existing today. In an act that was once standard, penmanship is no longer has a permanent place in school. It’s more a fascinating divergent lesson. A few chapters might be dedicated to the strange cursive writing style – pre-QWERTY.
Weidmann persisted. He uncovered and hunted for old techniques and then tried them himself. Filtering through fact and fiction for himself.
Lars Andersen an archer and disputed Master who is trying to navigate between fact and fiction of ancient methods in his craft. Is his underhand style new or re-invented? Some even dispute the materials he cites as his inspiration. They are hidden in legends and paintings. Yet, his mastery cannot be denied no matter how disputed. It is faster than anything seen. Unlike the tried and tested mastery of Jake, Lars’ path is more obscure to uncover.
What would it be like to have someone with this drive for mastery as a teacher?
And what of the apprentice?
I think it’s understood that we’ve got a feeling that education needs change. The recent pandemic is challenging education even more. What to change, how to change?
Modern standardized tests turn children into widgets. Read book A, then book B. Put this piece with that and carry them down the conveyor belt. Spit them out like a new car. Products of industrialized education. Like the printed word in a press. Lather with ink, hang to dry and put it on a shelf to sell.
It’s more complicated, I’m sure.
Since the early 1900’s methods like Montessori, Waldorf, or democratic schools like Summerhill have for over a century tried to show our industrialized printing press method can’t work.
My feeling is that we have a sense of why our education system is challenged. In start-up terminology, we have an issue of “scale.” I think we know that the master-apprentice relationship is the best, that one on one individual attention and care is best – but the cost of one on one grows considerably as the system grows.
As orality continues to retake hold, perhaps solutions will become clearer. Perhaps we’ll see a larger influx of children taking on their parent’s trade or specializations starting sooner when a Master sees a child’s inclinations and invites them to join their school (would we go so far as a sorting hat?). Making more, and smaller more specialized schools. Broadening the scope of what a successful education looks like and achieves.
Guilds & Universities
And here is the next logical step from The Master & The Student. Where do they learn? Where did they learn? How do they continue to learn?
What used to be the institutions that supported the Master & Apprentice? Are there any that haven’t held well over time? Guilds?
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 any memory of it spoken. It was mostly dead.
Yet – one of the secret societies kept this language flourishing. Schools.1
The knowledge amassed by the Roman Empire was so substantial, that to learn anything of substance, it was written in Latin. Schools really had no choice. And what a better way to keep it than to use it. But, outside their walls, there was no longer any particular use. It was a language for a single purpose – education.
The bonds of language
I doubt anyone can argue against the bonds created through language. They become deep and “societal” in nature.
Those that can speak Dothraki or Klingon; those First Nations that are working to keep their culture alive through language; those that program in C, Ruby, Python, PHP, etc…; those that can sign; those that… well I can keep going on.
I also doubt that anyone in the world is exempt from that “outsider” feeling when you are surrounded by a language you don’t understand. It’s humbling.
There’s a definitive line that’s made through the marriage of skill and culture.
The Academics
Did this Latin-only secret society, more than a millennia ago, help consolidate and foster today’s scientific community?
How language and the written word have built the academic community is an interesting thought. The cornerstone of dialogue is the “publication” of knowledge. The heated debate, arduous experimentation, visionary purpose comes down to the printing press. That’s, however, for later thought.
What I’m thinking of here – is in the language itself. The Latin that still exists, knowing its Latin name/form can define a guild of sorts. No different than knowing what a GIT repository is, or a P-trap, or an Octonion.
However, this isn’t anything new.
Some choose to learn, and some choose not to. But what if no one “cares” to learn anymore?
The Literaty
Perhaps calling them The Literaty is a bit extreme, but I feel appropriate.
Remember that side note from last week? That 15%? That’s important.
As we carry down the path into the postliterate, my belief is we will never become illiterate. We can’t ever go back. There will always be “stop” signs. There will always be light touches of language. Summaries to read: Coles, Cliff, Blinkist.
But the choice to go deeper into the written word, to read the truly complex, or just flat out long books. That’s what forms a new group.
The marriage of skill and culture. Those that choose to create and consume long-form content. The mix of skill and culture.
That 15%. They will walk among us knowing that outside of their walls – no one does it.
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 cup of coffee. And Joe ate dinner. And Joe walked to the store.
What order was any of that?
To an oral culture – does it really matter?
Based on A.R. Lauria’s Cognitive Development, it could be based on an oral mind’s ability to deduce and infer. Without relevant experience, it refuses the question. Here is one of many examples they posed to oral people:
All precious metals do not rust. Gold is a precious metal. Does it rust or not?
What the study founds was pretty fascinating. Out of those without any relevant experience, most (85%) were unable to or flat out wouldn’t solve the question posed. They didn’t care, thought the question was stupid or was dumbfounded why anyone would ask. It made had no relevance to them and their situation.
Of people who did have some experience, for example, had seen a piece of gold, they didn’t solve the questions by a landslide, only 60%. There were still subjects that refused. Only after being given additional, conditional assumptions of practical situations would the others, with experience, solve the question posed.
Interesting side note: Back to the group surveyed without any experience. Did you do the math? Not everyone refused. 15% could work through the inference without help. Perhaps this is nature? Perhaps this is the spice of life? Take a read through Who moved my cheese?
And then…?
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman brought up the “And now this…” culture. One that is ok with non-linear experiences. The phrase taken from newscasts outlines our new ability to detach from linear experiences. To switch seamlessly from graphic violence to a feel-good comedy without missing a beat. All it takes is a click of the button, and voila, new feelings.
Today we have additive experiences every day. When you find a new blog, do you start at the beginning? Facebook posts, tweets, grams, snaps, stream after stream, is there a semblance of order or hierarchy to them? No.
What’s more interesting is in some of these “streams” of additive moments, they remove any sequential nature – with algorithms bringing to the forefront popular posts from friends weeks ago folded into the present.
Now, what about binge-watching? That’s linear. Right? There may be a linear and subordinate nature to it, but only in the show itself. What about the context of the world? Where you are in your own experience might not be aligned with your friends. We have learned to remove expectations or assumptions of order onto others – they may be ahead or behind.
And because we can no longer have any expectation of order, we treat each other as beings of additive experiences.
Jeff ate dinner. And Jeff watched Game of Thrones. And Jeff shared his pictures at the park. And Jeff tweeted that meme. And Jeff texted Joe. And Jeff slept.
“[O]ral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance.”
Have you wondered why it’s taken humanity so long to progress?
Unless it has a practical function, most oral people will defy further thought1.
It may have been systemic or practical to slough memories off. The effort required to learn and keep useless knowledge takes away from survival: from plowing and planting, from hunting or being hunted, from preparing and planning the long winter.
But now – we slough for different reasons. It’s easier.
“Oh – what was that movie with so and so that had that guy with the horse?” IMDB.com.
“Hey, Google, what does a whale sound like?”
The amount of input we are taking in is too much. The amount of information is piling and piling on top of us all. Add to that, the amount of information we need to sift to find the relevant information. Or the information to inform us if the information we used to find the information is real information? Get it?
No wonder we slough.
However, in offloading, Ong highlights an equilibrium that happens. We become more like our peers and wish things to stay the same. Ask google what homeostasis means.
Not too thrilled
Let me start by saying I’m not happy with some areas that this idea can go. Here lays a pile of darkness on fire on my doorstep. And I feel it’s easy to stomp right into it. But I’m going to choose not to. You can stop reading here and go there on your own. There’s enough out there I’m sure.
If we are moving into the postliterate and our oral sensibilities are coming back and, if Orality doesn’t generalize and, if Orality is fluid, let me ask again.
What is similar?
Please let it be something else. I want the postliterate idea of this to change with all the options of so many beautiful and diverse commonalities.
I don’t want homeo-algorithms creating systems that funnel us, and label us and lead us into similar ideologies and views. I don’t want my internet to be different than your internet. Yet, with the mountain of “sloughing,” programmers and companies feel like they have no other choice to get us what we “want.”
All of them are Romans. Rome had so much diversity. Heck, they were polytheistic! “A pantheon of gods and goddesses, along with their own religions and rituals.2”
It stands to reason that they were kinda cool with not all believing in the same thing, or looking the same way. And at the same time, they were all Romans.
Statis – standing still
Read Who Moved My Cheese. On a good day, most of us don’t like change. There’s a preference for staying with what works.
And yet, given that we have gone through a boom of change over the past 500 years like no other.
But I’ve always had a problem with the idea that this growth we’re in is sustainable. We have the audacity to believe that we are capable of exponential growth in perpetuity. And yet every night we go to sleep. Night comes. Winter comes. Rest is required for life.
I think this pandemic has opened our eyes to this. And funny how out of all of this, slowly recovering, the internet is a buzz on “social audio.”
An oral culture requires our mouths to rest. Our minds to rest. To consume the words from someone else. Oral cultures take their time. They stand still. They prefer it.
Perhaps this is where AI and the future of offloading onto technology open new ways of being. Is our postliterate future one where we learn to stand still – but in a self-driving car?
Homeostasis isn’t opposed to change
The thing about homeostasis is it’s a process that wants stability in a system for survival. Nowhere does that mean it’s opposed to change. Ong chose his words well. When things are good – sure, things slow down. Yet it’s also fast to find new stability and adapt. 200 years is all it took after the fall of Rome to fracture into so many different languages.
Change isn’t easy. Imagine water becoming gas. In flux, the change looks dramatic and violent. And, I think, we’re metaphorically deep in a boiling time. Hopefully, our oral sensibilities are what will help us adapt and find the right equilibrium on the other side.
I have yet to read it, but a previous professor of mine gave me an intriguing summary of Douglas Biber’s Variation across speech and writing. He paraphrased “when we have lots of time, we tend to develop texts that are prose-like; when we don’t, we tend to develop texts that are speech-like, without respect to whether the text is written or spoken.”
When we have the cognitive wherewithal we take it. When we don’t we scream “look out!” And perhaps that’s where we are in our transition?
If was McLuhan is right in the 60’s when he said we were already into this new era, perhaps we’re only about 70 years into this postliterate transition.
In the world of ecology, things are never the same, only evolving. In my intro to this project, I talked about the story of the wolves of Yosemite. 14 wolves had amazingly positive results, but is Yosemite’s ecology the exact same as it was before everything when south? No. It can never be.
And this is the underlining principle of – once you go literate, orality is gone forever. You can never go back. All the thought leaders are conscientious when they use “orality” after the written word. They get very intricate in their choices of words and phrases: primal orality, oral sensibilities, oral residue, postliterate.
Lately, in my mind, I’ve begun to think about orality and literacy in a geological sense. Imagine Orality and Literacy in an ever-evolving process of erosion and sedimentation. Mixing to make different forms. Never again the original form. Requiring a lot of time and energy to mutate.
So, of course, it’s not orality, in the truest sense. The academics are spot on to avoid the word. On the other side, my non-academic says – stop your fancy words! It’s a rock.
To the laymen, it’s a rock, a cloud, a tree. For the masses to truly take on a concept, I feel we need a generic “word.” For all the colours of the rainbow, the average person still can say red, blue, green. I want orality to have the same understanding.
But Orality doesn’t generalize.
However…. this is where my literate mind starts having a small temper tantrum.
I’ve been struggling with an interesting and challenging thought. In purest orality, in what I’ve been reading, there are no generalizations. The ability to create a group of “X” goes out the window.
Everything has a unique and contextual quality void of the need for broad strokes. It’s no wonder why we wonder why there seem to be countless names of the same animal in different phases of life, why there could be 12 words for rain or snow in some cultures. It may be because, in an oral culture, it was unique and required a name unto itself, specific for the context.
And with this in mind, dialects and the history of language variations start to make a bit more sense.
In my pride of pattern recognition, when I create a view of my world, it’s worse than never the same again, it was never all the same in the first place.
What does this mean?
Simply put, fragmentation. More fragmentation in meaning. More fragmentation in thought. Worse yet, overlapping and unrelated fragmentation of the same things. Different intent and “meaning” for the same thing.
As technology has been advancing, I think some of this fragmentation is occurring naturally. We’re losing our ability to put things into buckets. It’s dividing and amalgamating— erosion and sedimentation. Here are a few examples:
Is Facebook part of the medium of the internet, or a medium unto itself? How do we categorize it across devices? Is Facebook on your phone the same as a browser?
What is a podcast? What is this clubhouse app? What is social audio, and what makes these things “different” than audio experiences before?
When twitter does roll out their “spaces” to everyone… what does that make them?
Bye-bye generalizations. What’s more interesting is your Youtube might not be my Youtube. Now imagine that for everyday words like “bank,” or “book,” or “spoke.” The same word – different connotations with unique contextual awareness for each.
I imagine the fragmentation is going to increase. But unlike previous geographical divisions, it will be a reflection of our community, or probably more like an amalgamation of communities, within this global village.
Here’s one last example you need to ponder and maybe ask your friends:
Question: What book did you last read? Question 2: Did you actually “read” it, or was it an audiobook?