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?
