Who is Nick?

Asking all my life.

Into the Postliterate

  • Don’t get it. Won’t get it.

    Don’t get it. Won’t get it.

    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?

    Photo by Soraya Irving on Unsplash

  • You know what you can recall

    Where was I in reviewing Ong’s characteristics of an Oral culture? I can’t recall.

    A little searching ( clickity clickity )… here it is.

    Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

    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.

  • Proficiently Literate?

    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?

    Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

    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)

    US on, are greater than 50%

    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:

  • Our grandiose lives

    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

    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.

    Take a look at these two lists, biographical films and biographical mini-series. I smashed them together to get this.

    Since 2020 we’ve made more historical biopics than all of the ’60s
    In case you’re curious year by year.

    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.

    Photo by Robert Gourley on Unsplash

    Originally posted on Substack

  • Am I really late?

    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, ageing, death – there is a passage of undeniable change.

    Calendars are far older than literacy. And of course, it’s important to survival: knowing when winter comes, when animals migrate, when plants bloom or are edible. There is a practical application to this, and as we’ve been learning about oral cultures, when it is something more practical, it’s something worth knowing.

    Though, in oral cultures, an agreement between cultures, societies and people is a far different matter. What one calls time, or how it relates, is reflective and personal. I wouldn’t expect any consensus.

    As we became more literate and science flourished, we started striving for a consensus. We made rules and started focusing on smaller increments: hours, minutes, seconds. We found the solar year, calculated leap years, time zones, daylight savings time, carbon dating, relativity, space-time, and we’re finding more ways to think and make time work with what we understand of the universe.

    Oral Time, Literate Time, Postliterate Time

    As we shifted from an oral culture to literate culture, our beliefs and idea of time altered to microscopic moments. Like writing, time became a position in a composition of books and paragraphs, words and letters.

    We called it time – but let’s face it – it’s not quite the same.

    So as we get into the postliterate, perhaps the connective desire to literate-like order will fade. And in some ways, perhaps we’re seeing the cracks.

    Let’s remove daylight savings.

    Let’s remove time zones altogether.

    Sure a stock trader, programmer, or scientist will need to care about precise “time,” but for the general population, what does it matter how close we get to “now”?

    My time isn’t your time and will never be the right time, and for the average person in the average life, perhaps that’s ok.

    I think our postliterate lives will be aliterate ones—lives that we know of letters and signs and sentences. There will always be some form of literacy, just cursory.

    Like being aliterate, we’ll be atemporal.

    We get it. We know it exists. We use a bit of it to know when to gather together for meetings or with friends & family, but other than that, what do we really need it for?

    Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

    Originally posted on Substack