Digital Media and Information in Society/Discussions/3-Orality

What is orality?

Fully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what a primary oral culture is like, that is, a culture with no knowledge whatsoever of writing or even the possibility of writing. Try to imagine a culture where no one has ever 'looked up' anything. In a primary oral culture, the expression 'to look up something' is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning. Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. You might 'call' them back - 'recall' them. But there is nowhere to look' for them. They have no focus and no trace (a visual metaphor, showing dependency on writing), not even a trajectory. They are occurrences, events.

The Oral Tradition:

Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication wherein knowledge, art, ideas and cultural material is received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another. The transmission is through speech or song and may include folktales, ballads, chants, prose or poetry. In this way, it is possible for a society to transmit oral history, oral literature, oral law and other knowledge across generations without a writing system, or in parallel to a writing system.

Oral tradition is information, memories, and knowledge held in common by a group of people, over many generations...

Transmission of information in oral cultures:

Oral traditions face the challenge of accurate transmission and verifiability of the accurate version, particularly when the culture lacks written language or has limited access to writing tools.

Oral cultures have employed various strategies that achieve this without writing.

• For example, a heavily rhythmic speech filled with mnemonic devices enhances memory and recall. A few useful mnemonic devices include alliteration, repetition, assonance, and proverbial sayings.
• The verse is often metrically composed with an exact number of syllables ... The verses of the epic or text are typically designed wherein the long and short syllables are repeated by certain rules, so that if an error or inadvertent change is made, an internal examination of the verse reveals the problem.
• Oral traditions can be passed on through plays and acting, ... Such strategies facilitate transmission of information without a written intermediate...

Psychodynamics of orality: Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy:

The fundamental characteristics of 'primary' orality:

1. "You know what you can recall:" mnemonics and formulas
2. Additive (and) rather than subordinative (when, then, thus, while)
3. Aggregative (the sturdy oak, the brave soldier) thought, not analytic (analysis: to break into component pieces for understanding)
4. Redundant: to maintain flow and understanding
5. Conservative: in that, new ideas are unlikely to be introduced: "the text frees the mind of conservative tasks, that is, of its memory work; and thus enables the mind to turn itself to new speculation" while allowing "every telling (of) the story ... to be introduced uniquely into a unique situation."
6. Close to the human lifeworld: "oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close reference to the human lifeworld; assimilating the alien, objective world to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings."
7. Agonistic: argumentative. Oral transmission is about struggle; competition; jousting, physical. "Standard in oral societies across the world, reciprocal name calling... Growing up in a still dominantly oral culture, certain you black males in the United States, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, engage in what is known variously as the 'dozens' or 'joning' or sounding' ... in which one opponent tries to outdo the other in villifying the other's mother. The doeznes is not a real fight but an art form..."
8. Emphatic and participatory rather than objectively distanced
9. Homeostatic: "oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostatsis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance."
10. Situational rather than abstract
11. Based in human memory, not recorded knowledge.

Orality, compared to writing

Writing, as a technology, requires premeditation and special art. Language is not a technology, no matter how well developed and efficacious. It is not best seen as something separate from the mind; it is what the mind does. “Language in fact bears the same relationship to the concept of mind that legislation bears to the concept of parliament,” says Jonathan Miller: “it is a competence forever bodying itself in a series of concrete performances.” Much the same might be said of writing—it is concrete performance—but when the word is instantiated in paper or stone, it takes on a separate existence as artifice. It is a product of tools, and it is a tool. And like many technologies that followed, it thereby inspired immediate detractors.

One unlikely Luddite was also one of the first long-term beneficiaries. Plato (channeling the nonwriter Socrates) warned that this technology meant impoverishment: "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.