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.