rimary rality

When we spe ak of oral communication we are already speaking of technology, the technology of speech. We tend to lose sight of orality's technology, because oral communication, by its very nature, leaves no permanent record of its passing except in the minds of the s peaker and listener. Speech is a highly interactive process. It is usually presumed that for every speaker there is an implied listener. Although a person may talk to him or herself, this type of speech does not necessarily fall under the category of c ommunication. The interactivity of speech becomes apparent when we realize that each auditor may in turn become a speaker as well. For the most part, there is little one can do to stop a listener from responding to the original speaker and initiating a dialog. Thus, audience participation is necessarily an important aspect of an oral culture. We must also remember that in oral culture there is no such thing as an original text. Each time a person speaks, he or she produces an original rendition.

rality in Relation to
Computer-Mediated Communication

With the advent of computer-mediated communication (CMC) a number of prediction s are being made about the new technology and the ways in which it will affect the future of human interaction. As we look to the future with breathless anticipation and the sense that we are engaged in the exploration of strange new worlds and new civil izations, boldly going where no one has gone before, we might do well to consider that there are few truly new inventions. Much of what is so greatly touted about the coming information and communications revolution can be shown to have its roots in oral ity, one of the oldest forms of human communication.

In his writings, Plato records Socrates' complaint against the medium of writing, or chirography. Among his arguments are the complaints that writing removes the speaker from the listener, thereby m aking it impossible for a dialog to take place. By committing the speaker's words to one fixed version, the text is also denying the speaker the ability to revise, correct, and change his or her opinion. Because there can be no dialog between writer and reader, the text and the writer become open to misinterpretation without hope of justifying themselves to the reader. Socrates also deplores the "forgetfulness" that writing will introduce to society. He criticises the transfer of memory from an intern al to an external source. In fact, it is not just the nature of memory that is being transformed, but the social fabric of the community as well. In oral culture, "the memories are personal...yet their content, the language preserved, is communal, somet hing shared by the community as expressing its tradition and its historical identity."(1) Writing dilutes this community of interaction and introduces the age of individualism.

In fact, our modern culture has so internalized the culture of the print medium, that CMC today is meeting objections that are nearly the mirror image of Socrates' critique of writing. Whereas Socrates objected to writing's ability to destroy community, modern-day critics object to CMC's ability to break down barriers of isolation in individual thought.(2) The development of print and writing have worked with emerging cultural values to produce a society that values individual reflection and introspection over community interaction.

C MC allows a community to be built that, while it may involve people who live at some distance from each other, has many of the aspects of communities formed in oral culture. Communities known as MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) or MOOs (MUD, Object Oriented) a llow the user to enter an interactive world. Conversations with other users take place in real-time. There is none of the delay associated with traditional print media. A statement doesn't have to go from author to editor to publisher to reader. MUDs and MOOs allow the reader to become author in a way that we have not seen since the introduction of print. Along with a sense of communal interactivity, MUDs and MOOs create a sense of co-presence. While some thought the telephone would revolutionize co mmunity and cause people to form their primary friendships with people outside of their physical neighborhood, in reality people were unable to escape from the fact that they were separated by distance from the person they were conversing with. MUDs and MOOs remove that sense of distance by creating a world structure in which the participants can "meet." These structures do not have to necessarily invoke "reality" of form, but they do "allow for a sense of routinized existence, a sense of fixity we gene rally associate with ordinary, repeated, commonplace behavior."(3) In other words, these structures function as "real" because people behave toward them as if they were real.

Another way in which CMC is reproducing the structure s of orality is through the use of hypertext. Hypertext allows the user to participate in creating the document that he or she will read. By determining what order the links will be followed and which ones will be ignored, the reader gains an amount of power to shape the text. Even the form of text changes in a hypertext environment. No longer do we have the author-privleging linearity of traditional print media. Instead it is replaced by a u ser-friendly web of associations and linkages. As in oral culture, production of meaning is dependent upon the auditor/reader rather than the speaker/author. The synthesis of meaning takes place on the reading rather than the authoring end of text.

Of course, all of this speculation about how media can change thought processes really begs the question, which came first: the chicken or the egg? Are our thought processes changing because of the new media, or is the new media reflective of already ch anging methods of thought?

For Further Reading on the Subjects Discussed Briefly Here:
The Common Place MOO: Orality and Literacy in Virtual Reality
How the Secondary Orality of the Electronic Age Can Awaken Us to the Primary Orality of Antiquity

Warning: Changes in Media May Produce Some Dizziness and Disorientation. Do Not Be Alarmed.