At the beginning of this lesson I pointed to the idea that technological advances in communication tools have been part of the impetus to rethink the divisive and hierarchical categorizing of literature and orality, and suggested that this is happening for a number of reasons. I’d like you to consider two aspects of digital literature: 1) social media tools that enable widespread publication, without publishers, and 2) Hypertext, which is the name for the text that lies beyond the text you are reading, until you click. How do you think these capabilities might be impacting literature and story?
— Erika Paterson
Up until the invention of Hypertext, text has always been an inherently linear media existing on a single line. You could take a book, and write every word written in it onto one single ribbon from beginning to end, losing no meaning. There would be no confusion as to what sentences should be put where, as the order of the words has been predetermined since the story had been published.
This is not the case for the oral tradition. Stories are expected to change through retellings, with different storytellers, different places, different times. According to the Indigenous Foundations Blog developed by UBC’s First Nations Studies Program, where text is rigid and unchanging, oral stories are fluid and active. Where traditional print is a blank slate that is filled with words from which the reader must make meaning, the oral tradition is told through a dynamic system of dialogue involving presence and cooperation.
In If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Chamberlin describes the strengths of this kind of oral tradition — that storytelling is for “building shape and meaning.”(Ch. 1) He describes this oral tradition as building stories and songs on the “arbitrariness of words and images, which is to say they are built on sand,” with meaning shifting through time and retellings. This constant shifting and rebuilding in the changing contexts of storytelling showcases how the stories involved are not about universal ‘facts’ but about beliefs, or as Chamberlin calls it throughout his aforementioned text, a ‘ceremony of belief.’
However, hyperlinks have changed the way that text exists on written media dramatically. Now there is the potential of any word or phrase in an article to be linked someplace entirely different. No longer is a story constrained to a single ribbon of words — instead, every article has the potential to create a network of references. Whether trying to piece together the flow of events in an article exploring many different perspectives, or when trying to follow a trend of conversations on Twitter, the way that these forms of media are being created, engaged with, and documented is straining the means by which traditional written media is able to meaningfully engage the way that it used to. The advancement of the many forms that media take in our colonial culture, from engaging content, academic conversations, and even the citation of eBooks, seems to be conflicting with the static record that colonial literature prides itself on.
And as the internet has increased in complexity, so too have the means of sharing content. Tools such as YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok have created environments that have complicated the relationships between content creator and consumer, and the many levels in between. By providing a platform through which every content creator is simultaneously a reviewer, consumer, producer, and collaborator, the role of the creator is shifting away from ‘writer,’ and towards something else, entirely. To describe the process of creating a piece of content, and having your audience laugh with, engage with, respond to, and recreate that content in other contexts — and doing the same for the content you come across — starts to sound more like an oral tradition than a written one, even if the whole process may only be done through text.
To say that this system is an oral tradition, or to imply that it is somehow de-colonized is deeply disingenuous. Despite the overarching capitalist power structure, to those who engage with these platforms externally, they have proven to be a useful system for dialogue, activism, engagement, and storytelling, allowing others to engage in a shared understanding of whatever they feel represents them. However, assuming that this new system in social media is solely the creation of those corporate leaders who brought them into fruition, is giving far too much agency to the hierarchy of the corporate world. In reality, these new structures of communication and engagement are the invention of people using those systems, sometimes despite the best efforts of social media giants’ leadership.
As it stands, it seems that the biggest threat to this decolonization-friendly medium is the colonial culture occupying it.
Works Cited
Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories. E-book, Knopf Canada, 2003
“Oral Traditions.” Indigenous Foundations, https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/oral_traditions/. Accessed 25 Jan. 2021.
Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 1:2.” English 372 99C Canadian Studies, UBC Blogs, https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl372-99c-2020wc/unit-1/lesson-12/. 25 Jan. 2021.
Rodriguez, Jeremiah. “This Inuk throat singer and her mom are keeping their culture alive on TikTok.” Lifestyle, CTV News, https://beta.ctvnews.ca/national/lifestyle/2021/1/24/1_5280181.amp.html. Accessed 25 Jan. 2021.
6 replies on “Blog 1:3 :: Blurring the lines”
Hi Zac,
I really like your interpretation of how different technologies are moving us towards an oral culture in the way that they have made communication collaborative and multilateral; we can now engage in discussion with authors, and get audience’s reactions in less formal and more instantaneous ways than a traditional review. This is reminiscent, as you point out, of the nature of orality. I think one thing that is particularly interesting about this new kind of hybrid between orality and literacy that the internet is facilitating is a record of how the story has changed or been responded to through time. With traditional oral storytelling, the words exist and cease to exist almost simultaneously – such is the nature of sound (not that I am suggesting this is a drawback; in fact, I think there is something very beautiful about the idea that a story will never be repeated in quite the same way, as it suggests a highly personalized experience that may be lacking sometimes with written text). However, with this collaborative, textual digital interaction, we can retain the sense of instantaneity that is inherent with orality while still being able to keep track of how people reacted, facts that would otherwise have been lost to time. This, I think, it the main alteration in the new oral tradition that you suggest we may be moving to.
I appreciate your closing comment that points out that this does not mean we are necessarily de-colonizing communication. I am curious about your last remark: “As it stands, it seems that the biggest threat to this decolonization-friendly medium is the colonial culture occupying it, claiming to have come up with it, first.” Do you think that there is a way to implement an “oral” culture within an inherently colonial society, or would such a thing require completely dismantling this colonial society?
Thanks so much for your post, I really enjoyed reading it!
Hi Victoria!
You’re right to ask about my last statement. I had some hesitance about going too deep into it.
To answer your question, I do think that the internet is primed for an oral culture, or oral/written hybrid to take over. It feels like much of recent engagement online has been adopting a lot of practices of storytelling. The creative side of the internet in the form of entertainment from YouTube to TikTok to Twitter and Instagram has been ripe with folks all around sharing and resharing their stories and jokes and images in ways that create a sort of dialogue between all those engaging in the culture. This feels to me a lot like a pseudo-oral storytelling practice. A lot has changed, but the principles of audience engagement, unfixed structure, cultural relevance are all still present even through a textual format.
But as you pointed out, I don’t think that this is the same as decolonizing the internet. There are plenty of oral storytelling practices that have been tossed aside by the colonial power structure that exists, and replacing that aspect of culture with a colonized version of it is not just further colonialism, it is deeply anti-decolonization.
I think that there is a lot of white fragility and rage surrounding the suggestion that colonial industries and systems find ways to decolonize and learn more about indigenous culture autonomy, and how it can better approach reconciliation. Where there has been a lot of progress over the years, internet communities have also done a lot of work to compound their follower’s biases, and I can’t imagine this changing without active, draining efforts from those in power.
Hi Zac,
Thanks for these words! I really liked your point about text being traditionally linear on a page and how hyperlinks and so many other digital forms disrupt and evolve this. This connects so well to Chamberlin’s point about how Western/European views of time are linear and other cultures view time as cyclical.
It also made me think about the definition of text that continues to expand in school curricula. I am a new teacher and teaching is very much on the brain these days. The current definition of text in the BC curriculum states:
“Text and texts are generic terms referring to all forms of oral, written, visual, and digital communication:
Oral texts include speeches, poems, plays, and oral stories.
Written texts include novels, articles, and short stories.
Visual texts include posters, photographs, and other images.
Digital texts include electronic forms of all the above.
Oral, written, and visual elements can be combined (e.g., in dramatic presentations, graphic novels, films, web pages, advertisements).”
I explore this definition of text with my high school students at the start of the year. Most of them only consider “text” to mean writing, so it is interesting to expand this idea as a class and focus on ‘things that communicate’ or ‘ways we can make meaning.’ I’m really interested to add this idea of linear and non-linear text and see how we can connect this to discussions of decolonization.
I think your final point is very powerful. The internet (Tik Tok, Snapchat, Hyperlinks, Reddit) did not invite a non-linear medium of communication. And this branching, cyclical way of communicating is not inherently anti-colonial. It is, as you said, a “decolonization-friendly medium” that becomes powerful when we use it explicitly as a tool to deconstruct the colonial structures we live within.
A question for you: With younger generations so much more deeply entrenched in the ways of online communication, do you think this traditional view of text as a permanent and rigid thing will erode?
You are right, younger generations are so much more entrenched in the form of online communication than I can even start to imagine for myself. For one, I am quite tech savvy, but I have never been very interested in using social media the way it is meant to be used. And for another, while I discovered a lot of the internet that is popular now (Youtube, Twitter, Forums) when I was a late-Teen/Young Adult, I cannot IMAGINE engaging in these forms of media at a younger age, and what that would do to the way I understand the world. I don’t mean this in the sense that it would be inherently worse, just that it would be drastically different.
I do think that the idea of text is eroding. I think it has in some ways already eroded. I remember being told in elementary school that I needed to learn cursive because that is the only way high school teachers would let me hand anything in. I knew that text was a written form of communication and it was essential to the way I would succeed in life, and this scared me because I was terrible at handwriting. So I practiced writing in cursive until it was the only way I could write — so that I would be ready for high school. Then high school came around and I found out that that was a lie. Cursive was no longer the hot thing that my Grade 7 teacher thought it was.
I feel like a lot of the same is happening in education surrounding printing and the ways that students document their work. Computers are much more essential to education than they used to be, because they are much more central to how the rest of the world works. Digital literacy and digital citizenship are so much more necessary simply because we cannot send students out into the world to figure out how not to get catfished or harassed or phished for themselves. In elementary I have purposefully built in digital media simply because students cannot be left on their own to discover that how they behave online affects their real lives — because more and more, online life is real life.
And all of this is surrounding the idea that text has not been just text for a long time. Emoji’s are a major way that people convey the context of their words, and are not considered traditional text. Nor are gifs and images, which is a significant part of communication. People communicate using Stories (the SM feature, not the topic of this class) on various platforms as well as TikTok which often involve a mixture of audio, video, images, text and gifs all at once. I don’t think that the younger generations view text as just text, because they have no history of seeing text as anything other than all the ways we communicate.
I think that the curriculum has changed to this newer understanding of text, partly because it was already heading in that direction and we needed to make sure we were preparing them to interact with the world as it was becoming; and partly because this new understanding of text is how the world is, and we need to teach them where they are and not where we want them to be.
Hi Zac,
I found this blog post so interesting and really made me think about all the ways I think of oral and written traditions. In your blog post, you raise a really interesting point that as we going through rapid advancement of technology we are finding ways to express ourselves in other forms other than writing. For me personally, I love and hate this advancement. I love it like you said in your response, any way I like and I find what I want to hear. However, I do not like it because it takes away from the personal interaction with traditional knowledge keepers such as elders. In the past year I am finding that it is more and more important to utilize the interwebs for forms of connection and knowledge sharing. But, in doing so we are also loSo, in light of this dilemma maybe we can find the balance between having important stories online but also maintaining the traditional way of sharing stories. Something else that I thought of while writing this is that without in person storytelling you are able to feel the energy that they are giving off while telling it and you are more free to ask questions and engage in the conversation immediately. With online storytelling however you can’t feel that energy nor, get immediate interaction to the storyteller (no matter how fast they reply).
In short, you pose a really important question and I am going to continue to think about this.
Hi Lenaya,
Thank you for your kind words.
I understand what you mean about feeling the energy someone is giving off, completely. I find it quite difficult to communicate with people online. I feel like I’m a pretty good writer, but I AGONIZE over what I write. For blog posts like these, thats one thing, and an expected part of academic writing. But for work emails, texts to friends, I find it hard to communicate if I cannot even at least hear the person on the other end. Perhaps this is an issue with needed fast paced responses, and knowing what to do next, but to a large degree, I do feel like there is just something substantial missing from having conversation just through text, and not through face-to-face interactions where body language, tone of voice, flow of conversation, eye-contact, personal connection are all present.