Orality and Literacy Week 1 Assignment for Comm Lab
The first assignment for Comm Lab was to set up a blog and post a response/notes to reading from Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy. I have linked the blog set up documentation to a previous post.
The first two chapters seemed a bit dry and redundant, but putting it all together with the third and fourth chapter made it a bit more interesting. I may link this post to the next book reading from Understanding Media, with a more in-depth response.
The following notes include items that stood out to me from chapters 1-4.
Chapter one notes:
Orality and Literacy
Verbal and written literacy are not the same
In current society, written language. Literacy is given greater importance
There is a weak understanding of the difference between verbal and written literacy/language
There is a relationship between what is spoken and what is written
Chapter two notes:
The modern discovery of primary oral cultures
Attitudes toward oral folklore were changing and disparaging viewpoints were being discredited
Milman Parry’s discovery: “Virtually every distinctive feature of Homeric poetry is due to the economy forced on it by oral methods of composition”. P.21 (book) p.36 (pdf)
Marshall McLuhan perceptions of transformations from orality through literacy and print to electronic media: ‘The medium is the message”.
Some psychodymanics of orality
Oral utterance is ‘dynamic’
There is power in words or at least the perception of power in words
Sound determines modes and thoughts of expression
“You know what you can recall”
Thinking in mnemonic patterns facilitate recall
“Formulas help implement rhythmic discourse and act as mnemonic aids.”
Thought and expression tend to be:
-additive rather than subordinative
-aggregative rather than analytic
-redundant
-traditional
-humanized- relating to the “human lifeworld”
-orality is situated within the context of struggle
-oral societies live in the present, “direct, semantic ratification”, integrity of the past is subordinate to the integrity of the present
-oral cultures employ concepts that are more situational than abstract
Music may act as a constraint to fix a verbatim oral narrative, but it may increase dependence on formulas rather than free it
Verbomoteur cultures rely more on effective use of words
Oral communication unites people
Chapter three notes:
Writing restructures consciousness
Writing establishes ‘context-free’ language
Writing is a technology
Writing is unnatural, oral speech is natural
Writing heightens consciousness
Chapter four notes:
Print, space and closure
Shift from oral to written speech is a shift from sound to visual space
“Print created a new sense of the private ownership of words.”
Print creates a sense of closure
New age of secondary orality; still communal, but more deliberate and self-conscious
