Orality and Literacy Flashcards
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
Ben Franklin
presumption that a society’s technology drives the development of its social structure and cultural values. Technology as the primary cause of major social and historical changes at the macro level of social structure, and at the micro level in terms of their profound social and psychological influences on individuals. Technology causes.
Technological determinism
“to have an effect on something or someone”; in a media studies context, affect also points to the ways that meanings circulate between, among, through, in, and around human and non-human settings alike. Mediated communication technologies appear to have agency, and we respond to them as though they do. Technology affects.
Affect
Model
Roman Jakobson
Culture as a skyscraper
FILL IN
using any external means to convey communication
Each means of mediated communication creates its own pattern, its own signature of human behaviour.
Mediated communication
The Affects of Mediated Communication
Collapse of space and time
Expands as it limits
Dazzles as it stupefies
Power
- Expands personal knowledge base and provides ever more information
remote from the here and now; information becomes anonymous - Takes our attention from the here to connect to the there
- Nearly instant; global in capacity (McLuhan’s “Global Village”
Collapse of space and time (The Affects of Mediated Communication)
- Trade-off with other activities
- Expansion of the personal into mass communication modes / weakening of the economic underpinnings of traditional mass communication
Expands as it limits (The Affects of Mediated Communication)
- Ubiquitous and always on to draw one’s attention
- Drives out deep thought that accompanies silence
- Talent (e.g. “the star”) trumps individual expression (autotune)
Dazzles as it stupefies
(The Affects of Mediated Communication)
- Always efforts to control mediated communication
- Used by rulers to maintain power and by specialists to undermine it
- Increase in information producers
- “Knowledge gap” – divide between information rich and information poor
More educated means more mediated communication
Power (The Affects of Mediated Communication)
The Evolution of Media (2)
From Emergence to Convergence
OR
Dennis Baron, “From Pencils to Pixels”
From Emergence to Convergence
Emergence, or novelty stage
Entrepreneurial stage
Mass media stage
Convergence Stage
E.E.M.C.
Dennis Baron, “From Pencils to Pixels”
Accessibility
Function
Authentication
Media and technology evolve “from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel – from open to closed system. It is a progression so common as to seem inevitable, though it would hardly have seemed so at the dawn of any of the past century’s transformative technologies.”
“The Cycle” - Tim Wu
i.e. Venus of Willendorf
Symbols of fertility, woman
Things with special meaning that allow us to conceive, express and communicate ideas.
Use of symbols and signs is a central characteristic of human behaviour. From the beginnings of humanity, symbols and signs have encapsulated the knowledge, experience and beliefs of all people.
Their meaning is arbitrary. Not perceived by the senses or by logic but can only be learned from those who use them.
Meaning becomes enigmatic
Symbols and Signs
Stone Age (pre-history) Middle and late Upper Palaeolithic, c. 30,000-12,000 BCE
Archaeological evidence for use of symbols:
- use of OCHRE – brownish red pigment believed to be used for symbolic rather than for functional purposes (i.e. Himba (northern Namibia) woman covered with a traditional ochre pigment)
- FUNERAL PARAPHERNALIA such as flowers and antlers deposited in burial sites. These also suggest a religious function/symbolic purpose.
- TALLIES – parallel notches engraved on bones
First step in data processing:
a. made information concrete
b. made information abstract
concrete info becomes abstract markings
removed data from original context
separated knowledge from the knower
generated unprecedented objectivity in dealing with information
c. rudimentary
unspecific
one-to-one correspondence only
Neolithic – New Stone Age - 10,200 BCE - 4,500-2,000 BCE
- CLAY TOKENS moulded into distinct shapes; developed along with agriculture as a means for more sophisticated counting and record keeping.
More on Tokens
- The system was simple
- Clay was a common material requiring no special skills or tools to be worked.
- The forms of the tokens were plain and easy to duplicate
- One-to-one correspondence – the simplest method for dealing with quantities
- Tokens stood for units of goods, and they are independent of phonetics.
- The code allowed new performances in data processing and communication.
- It was the first mnemonic device able to handle and store an unlimited quantity of data
- It brought more flexibility in the manipulation of information by making it possible to add, subtract and rectify data
- It enhanced logic and rational decision making by allowing the scrutiny of complex data
- Symbols that laid the groundwork for the invention of pictographic writing.
is “a system of more or less permanent marks used to represent an utterance in such a way that it can be recovered more or less exactly without the intervention of the utterer.”
Beginning as a system of pictographs
Writing
Is writing a require for civilization
NO = It was invented independently in already existing civilizations in at least three places: Mesopotamia (including Egypt), China, and Mesoamerica.
Developed most likely as a direct consequence of the compelling demands of expanding economies
Writing
written symbols that represent meaning
Logograms
– symbols representing objects and concepts orpictograph, is an ideogram that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object.
Pictograms
– symbols representing ideas
Ideograms
combined logographic and alphabetic elements
Hieroglyphics
letters represent sounds
Alphabet
Writing is a Technology that Restructures though
Walter Ong
_____ has a special status in our culture—it’s imperious—“domineering; arrogant; overbearing” (i.e. hegemonic)
Literacy
“Ill-literacy” is akin to having an illness and to being a deviant.
Why?
“We have interiorized the technology of writing so deeply that without tremendous effort we cannot separate it from ourselves or even recognize its presence and influence.”
“Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing, but even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form.”
evanescent (fleeting); like music; temporal; an event
Sound
___ cultures rely on formulaic constructions that are easy to remember
Keeps thinking close to the human life world—personalizes things and issues, stores knowledge in stories, cultural values have to be continually repeated. Narrative society.
Essentially a conservative society
Oral
the orality of cultures with no knowledge at all of writing
Primary Orality
the orality of radio, television and film, which grows out of high-literacy cultures, and depends on a wide-spread cultivation of writing and reading for its invention
Secondary Orality
Writing seen as an intrusion into the life world, as something foreign. In Phaedrus (370 BCE), Plato critiques writing, arguing that it is... (HINT: F.D.U.I)
Inhuman—it establishes outside the mind what should only be inside the mind
Unresponsive—the words can’t talk back; they always say the same thing; essentially passive
Destroys memory—individuals come to rely on an external source; writing weakens the mind
Written word cannot defend itself whereas the spoken word can
Falsifies—writing freezes dynamic orality into discreet objects
Examples:
Ong compares Plato’s critique of writing to critiques of computers that were being made in 1986 when he wrote this essay. The same critiques are often made of new technologies.
Cell phones destroy memory.
Google making us lazy
