ETEC540: Text Technologies

As cultures emerge, their needs evolve and transformations occur. This brings about a lot of changes. Evidently, this triggers schools of thought, promoters, antagonist, neutralists etcetera. Each school presents arguments or positions that matter to them. Ultimately, they each take their stand thinking it is for a good purpose.

The changes that occur in a culture is also in itself to serve a perceived need, hence from oral to literate to electronic cultures, these groups of people of schools of thought remain common denominators.

An innovation or invention is usually perceived as “futuristic” and this creates within the culture, a fear of the unknown which usually presents as the different schools of thought.

Reading through this history as presented in (Ong 1982, ch.3-4), the idea comes across to me that these changes come about not to eradicate the existing or status quo, but rather to consolidate them. Presently, the electronic culture has given a voice to both the oral and literate cultures, in the former (orality), through audio/visual recording and the latter (written word) through emails and chat. Thus the new innovations or inventions make the previous more potent and effective in serving the current and future needs of society. Thus these innovations herald the shift from one culture to another.

These changes seen as technologies appear to be man’s effort (consciously or unconsciously) to refine that which is already in existence in order to communicate better and be more inclusive in approach.

In the end, it all strives to bring unity, while not denying individuality. The electronic culture has emerged to aggregate the oral, written and printed word (technologies)to create a unity while still keeping the individual character of each of them.

“Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness” (Ong 1982, p.81)

If we perceive writing as a technology, can we also argue that speaking is a technology that came about following man’s desire to communicate more intelligibly?

Ong rightly pointed out the resistance faced by each new innovation from writing to printing to computers. (Ong 2002,  pp.78-79).

The recurring arguments in each culture hinges on memory, man’s ability to retain knowledge and originality, man’s ability to produce “authentic” knowledge.

For Socrates, in his oral culture, writing seemed like an innovation that will make man’s brain redundant, “Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind.” (Ong 1982, p.78)

A closer look at this statement makes me wonder if Socrates words by Plato in the Phaedrus (274-) were indeed prophetic; with the spate of “Google it” going on among school age children (and in society at large) who seem to think there is no need to think any concept through when there is a resource they can “access.”

It makes me wonder how computers have affected the thinking of the electronic culture. I wonder if this has produced a thought process of “e-cheating” in our electronic age hence the issue of originality comes into question like Socrates implied centuries ago.

Printing to Heironimo Sqarciafico was a destructive tool to man’s memory. “Abundance of books makes men less studious” (quoted in Lowry 1979, pp. 29-31): it destroys memory and enfeebles the mind by relieving it of too much work” (Ong 1982, p.79)

The reference here by Ong was the pocket computer, which even though it has a lot of benefits does however seem to impede thinking. You do not need to memorise how to get to a location anymore when your pocket computer has a GPS. Infact, you do not need to remember how you got there the first time if you had to do it again. You simply rely on the GPS to think it through.

While, I agree with Socrates about one thing; “writing pretends to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product.” (Ong 1982, p.78), I think that to say that those who use writing will become forgetful is rather preposterous on his part.

Socrates had no idea what the fall out of writing would be at the time because he had not tried it or seen people who had tried it and attest to his proposition. His statement does however bring a few questions to mind.

Why do I keep a journal? Does the singular act of writing in my journal destroy my memory or my ability to remember things?

Am I using my journal as my databank or as a backup to my memory? If something were to happen to my journal, what becomes of my expressed thoughts? How has journal keeping or writing affected the way I think?

The impact of these innovations and the shift from one to the other cannot be denied for it is indeed something to ponder.

How do these innovations affect how we think?

Are these innovations creating different forms of thought, i.e. are the thought patterns of the oral, literate and electronic cultures truly different one from the other?

According to Ong, the literate cultures are more objective in their thinking (Ong 1982, pg.112). As much as Ong considers this a plus, it does have a negative side, it shows that text is not capable of being humane and that implies that a literate society may also create a self absorbed thought pattern

How do they affect what we retain not just in our memories but in our society?

The oral cultures may have lost some information in the process of transfers over time, but not intentionally. It would have been a conscious effort on this culture to task their memories to remember things clearly. I think that for most of them, they would have developed a photographic memory.

In the final analysis, I would say that new innovations or technologies do influence how we relate to our environment (people, attitudes, etc). They are largely change catalysts but with each innovation, from oral to written, to print and to electronic, it is clearly a way to enhance that which already exists. Each innovation or technology is an advancement over what existed before it so it cannot be judiciously compared to the other  as each comes about and exists to serve the needs of its era.

References

Ong, Walter. (1982.) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen.

Postman, N. (n.d.). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

How extraordinarily planted in the literate world we are as we sit at computers, as individuals, and meld our thoughts together with people around the world without a single auditory sound coming from our mouths.  How incredibly non-oral we are, as we cast our voiceless thoughts out into our electronic learning space, and wait to hear soundless, text-rich voices of our classmates either praise or lambaste our silent utterances. Aptly titled, “Text Technologies: The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing,”  my  initiation into this course has stirred in me many questions and reflections about reading and writing and how these two ancient arts will evolve in the future, as well as how basic communication and speech will be impacted by technological change.

Postman’s “The Judgement of Thamus” poses the question, “Four centuries of print & orality.  Will computers defeat communal speech.  Will the computer raise egocentrism to the status of a virtue?” (Postman, page 17).

Has the computer already defeated communal speech?  No, of course not.  We are speaking as a learning community, though our voices are in neutral.  The computer is not speaking, it is transferring.  It is not interpreting, it is simply a vehicle of transmission.  However, the computer is allowing some of us to disengage a little bit more with our orality, making it possible to learn in an egocentric manner, devoid, yes, of the messy face-to-face debates and dilemmas that come up in traditional classroom settings; but devoid also of the meaningful connections that come with how the spoken word is presented (inflection, emphasis, emotions), and the non-verbal cues that participate in holistic communication.

As I enter the on-line learning environment I am confronted regularly by the excellent thoughts and commentaries of my highly literate colleagues and chosen authors for this course.  While this has been enlightening, I find the lack of oral content with this type of learning unfamiliar.  I am stretching to read and interpret purely textural information, knowing that my predisposition to orality is not serving me well in this context (no marks for being a strong public speaker and good listener here!)

Ong painstakingly characterizes primary oral culture in Chapter 3 of his book, “Orality and Literacy.”  While I cannot begin to imagine persons who have never been exposed to text of any sort, I can find some of my preferences and dispositions towards learning rooted in oral culture.  I tend to find significant meaning and assimilation of information based on dialogue with others or simply listening.  I create mnemonics and formulas to commit abstract concepts to memory.  I tend towards using repetition and exaggeration in my mind to fortify important concepts or habits of mind that I want to retain. I work in a highly charged oral environment, an elementary school.  My stock and trade is to listen and speak, to communicate with a whole range of modalities.  I use a computer a great deal of the time, but mostly to record information or relay messages and information that have a basis in face-to-face communication with people.  In this course, and I suspect the on-line learning environment in general, the emphasis is on my ability to hear the conversation in my head, imagining what Jeff, Ryan, Irene, and all the other participants sound like and how they mean to sound as they present their arguments and ideas.  It occurs to me, as I read their electronic posts, how reliant I am on “communal speech” to develop my understanding.  Will “orally-biased” people like me be selectively removed from on-line academia as learning turns more and more towards literature and text delivered and responded to electronically?  Or will the technology continue to advance to the point that the full range of learning styles will be richly and fully accommodated in the future?  I tend to believe the latter will come to fruition, given the extraordinarily rapid pace of advancement in learning technologies.

References:

Ong, Walter. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen.

Postman, N. (n.d.). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

This commentary will review the 2007 Anthony Grafton article, “Digitization and its discontents in the New Yorker on the issue of transferring books and other written material online as it is the case of Google Library Project.

The ambitious Google Books Library Project of building a comprehensive index of all books in the world has created controversies. While Grafton (2007) argues that ‘the project is nothing more than a flare of light in the still unexplored night sky of humanity’s recorded past’, Kelly (2006) affirms that technology of search will transform isolated books into the universal library of all human knowledge. I argue that even though, the project may be the most important contribution to spread the knowledge; it is fundamental to elevate the  critical, analytical  and research skills of learners. A book is a product unlike other products because of its role in promoting diversity and civilization.

Grafton (2007) offers a compendious history of library. He begins with a comparison of Google attempts throughout an efficient procedure for capturing and reproducing texts, with Ptolemy (AD 90) when he decided to gather together a comprehensive collection of Greek works, mainly for his own use. It was the origin of the most famous ancient library of Alexandria. Six hundred years later Eusebius devised a system of cross-references that enabled readers to find parallel passages in the four Gospels. He used the system with an organized group of secretaries and scribes to produce and sell parchment of bibles.

Continuing with his historical perspective, he argues that the printing revolution in the XV century, which transformed the work of librarian and readers made some impresarios of book technologies carried away and faced financial problems. Later, by the Renaissance times when the huge amount of books become overwhelming, they developed a systematic note-taking. And, from the eighteenth century libraries used a variety of indexing and cataloging systems. Due to the quickly multiplying of resources, a micro-photography appeared. But the films and reprint-based library never become fully comprehensive as well successful.

Taking into account the failure of microfilms, the digitization came up to cover a gap in the realm of libraries. However, in this point Grafton gets back to Google, Microsoft, and other companies in the digitization business and states that “the Internet will not bring us a universal library, much less an encyclopedic record of human experience. None of the firms now engaged in digitization projects claim that it will create anything of the kind.” While  O’Donell (1998) argues that the virtual libraries will be in a community where information is decentralized, and no longer dependent on a finite circle of publishers  with its limitation.

Grafton (2007) also discusses some problems Google Book Project library is facing  like the optical character recognition, which in its double process has some quirks, the possibilities that the scanner miss pages, or produce out of order or a bad quality of  the copy. He added the Google has no immediate plan to scan ancient books. In this concern  O’Donell (1998) asserts that before the relative stability of printing, texts were often disconcertingly labile and unreliable.

Economics issues are also stressed in Grafton’s (2007) comments. For instance, he mentioned that materials from the poorest societies may not attract companies that rely on subscriptions or on advertising for cash flow. In the other hand, he clearly identifies the danger of monopolization by the Google Library Project. Contrary, he acknowledges the philanthropic work of smaller project e.g. the Project Gutenberg, Million Books among others.

To conclude, I think the besides his humanistic approach, the strongest Grafton’s (2007) argument against the Google search engine is his compendious history of Library. Santaya (1905) asserted that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”  While Dertouzos (1997)  said in an interview in Scientific American that  a big mistake was done 300 years ago when we separated technology and humanism, “It’s time to put the two back together.”

References

Grafton, A. (2007). Digitization and its discontents. Retrieved from: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/05/071105fa_fact_grafton?currentPage=al

Kelly, Kevin (2006). Scan the book. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html

O’Donnell, J. (1994). The Virtual Library; an idea whose times has passed”. Retrieved from: http://web.archive.org/web/20070204034556/http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/virtual.html

O’Donnell, J. (1998). Avatars of the Word. From Papyrus to Cyberspace. The instability of the text. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. 44-49.

Massachuttes Institute of Technology. (2001). Retrieved from: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/dertouzos.html

Orality and Literacy

Walter Ong’s book Orality and Literacy takes an in-depth look at the differences between oral and literate cultures. As a former kindergarten teacher, I chose to compare Ong’s examples of oral cultures with the pre-literate culture of my kindergarten students and found many of his claims to ring true in the early primary classroom. Language and thought processes in the early days of kindergarten (before the students are reading) are similar to what Ong found in oral cultures. Similarities between young children and primarily oral cultures include that language is rhythmic, additive, redundant and situational.

Rhythmic

Throughout the kindergarten year students are exposed to all sorts of programs. Jolly Phonics is used to help develop letter sounds which will later lead to decoding text. Each lesson is designed with a rhythmic, repetitive story and song to help the children remember the sound associated with the letter. The patterns in the stories and songs solidify the sounds for recall in the child’s memory. “ In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence.”(Ong, 2002, p.34) These mnemonic patterns are used so often in the K classroom and are a daily part of learning. Like a traditional oral culture, pre-literate children benefit from similar strategies to retain information.

Additive

Have you ever listened to a young child tell a story? They continually use the word ‘and’ while trying to get their point across. Their stories are additive and lengthy – they have not learned to condense yet. As evident in Genesis 1: 1-5 oral cultures use an additive method of speaking. That specific passage includes 9 ‘and’s’! It is a natural way to connect thoughts when speaking and feels normal for both pre-literate children and people living in and oral culture. Young children do not have the ability to make compound sentences yet.

Redundancy

“The mind must move ahead more slowly, keeping close to the focus of attention much of what it has already dealt with. Redundancy, repetition of the just-said, keeps both speaker and hearer surely on the track.” (Ong,2002,pp-39-40) Children’s stories are often redundant – I have never taken the time to think about why. Reading through the above quote in Chapter 3 of Ong’s book made me question why young children’s stories tend to be redundant and if I could make a connection here between orality and pre-literacy. Children make sense of what is around them and use the tools they have available to be successful. It makes sense that they would use repetition to get their story out and to make sure the listener knows what they are talking about. This is a strong connection between pre-literate and illiterate cultures.

Situational rather than Abstract

“Oral cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frames of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the living human lifeworld.”(Ong, 2002,p.49) Like people living in a primarily oral culture, young children use concrete thinking. They look around them to create meaning of what they are learning and use their own experience to make sense of what is happening. Of course they remain close to the living human lifeworld as it is all that they know. If abstract thinking comes from chrinographic and typographic, children in these environments will be able to make the switch when they become literate.

Summary

One must be aware that there are also large differences between oral culture and pre-literate children. Although they may be unable to make sense of it, my kindergarten students are surrounded by text, technology and symbols. They are also part of a literate culture and can look to their teacher, family members and others to help them. The purpose of my post was to see if there were similarities between the two within the context of understanding the vast differences.

Ong’s book has caused me to critically look at language development of young children and think about their oral language in comparison to strictly oral cultures. As mentioned above, pre-literate children do display many of the characteristics of oral cultures including their tendency to use rhythmic patterns, use additive language, be redundant and use situational thought. They learn to become literate from their oral roots. Children make sense of information by looking for visuals, and listening to the spoken word. We are all born into an oral culture and display these characteristics in early childhood.

References:
Ong, Walter. (1982) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen.

In Biases of the Ear and Eye, Daniel Chandler looks at the issues behind the ‘Great Divide’ theories and provides alternate views.  The article provides evidence against the idea of a monumental division between literate and illiterate people, and highlights the importance of recognizing biases.  Although he successfully sheds an alternate light on the ‘Great Divide’ theories, I believe Chandler underestimates the impact of literacy and orality.

Chandler approaches the ‘Great Divide’ theories from three perspectives: Phonocentrism (where speech is privileged over writing), Graphocentrism (where writing is viewed more importantly than speech), and Logocentrism (which views verbal communication more highly than non-verbal communication) and simplifies the theories into arguments of “the ear versus the eye” (Chandler, 1994, p.1).  These theories are based on the view that the arrival of writing had an enormous affect on cognition.  This view results in several dichotomies, such as “ ‘primitive’ vs. ‘civilized’ . . . ‘pre-rational’ vs. ‘rational’ . . . ‘oral’ vs. ‘visual’, or ‘pre-literate’ vs. ‘literate’ ” (Chandler, 1994, p.1).

Classifying people as as ‘oral’ vs. ‘literate’ is an simplistic approach and has resulted in increasing criticism.  Chandler explains that the alternative theories, which are called the ‘Continuity’ theories, view the change from orality to literacy as an interactive process that is affected by the medium’s technical limitations and social context (Chandler, 1994).  He points to Cole and Scribner’s research which, contrary to the ‘Great Divide’ theories, demonstrated that literacy didn’t have a cognitive effect (Chandler, 1994), and instead identified schools as a source of major intellectual change.  This is important because ‘Great Divide’ theories fail to “separate effects of schooling from effects of literacy” (Collins, 1995, p.80).

“The notion of ‘primitive mentality’ is now rejected by most anthropologists, though it survives amongst some conservative theorists” (Chandler, 1994, p.1).  As well, research suggests that literacy works differently for different cultures and “the specific cognitive properties or linguistic structures claimed as consequences of literacy do in fact exist in oral cultures” (Daniell, 1999, p.397).  Critics of ‘Great Divide’ theories claim that literacy can not be seperated from culture and that theorists made assumptions on people that weren’t around to be questioned (Daniell, 1999).   In Chandler’s view, “writing is no ‘better’ than speech, nor vice versa – speech and writing need to be acknowledged as different media with differing functions” (Chandler, 1994, p.1).  I agree that they serve different functions, but there are times when one can be superior.  “Oral communication unites people in groups”(Ong, 1982, p.68), develops memory, and evokes empathy, while writing can be archived, allow for objectivity, and be abstract. Both are more than mere functions and can provide unique responses.

One of the flaws with the “Great Divide” theories is a failure to acknowledge pre-existing biases, such as those that come with being literate and Western.  Chandler believes that because we are products of a literate world, “we cannot write ‘without bias’, but we can learn to become more aware of our biases” (Chandler, 1994, p.2) and how they influence us.  However, how do university graduates truly comprehend the value of something to an oral culture or what is lost when it becomes a literate one?

In identifying some of the biases that exist in the ‘Great Divide’ theories, Chandler points out how Walter Ong refers to voice as ‘alive’ and ‘natural’, while writing is ‘dead’ and ‘artificial,’ and that Ong views ‘voice’ as having primacy in groups (Chandler, 1994).  Yet, I would argue that orality is more natural, doesn’t require tools, exists before writing, and evolves more quickly.  Ong does indeed romanticize orality, but he also believes that writing is responsible for shaping human intellect (Ong, 1982).  In an attempt to demonstrate Ong’s phonocentric and religious biases, Chandler reveals some of his own bias by stating that “to the Jesuit Father Ong, writing surely represents the Fall of Man from Edenic existence” (Chandler, 1994, p.2).  However, I find that Ong demonstrates a graphocentrism by commenting that “writing heightens consciousness” (Ong, 1982, p.81) and that, by being dead, writing “assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living readers (Ong 1977, pp. 230-271)” (Ong, 1982, p.80).  Some additional bias appears in the article when Chandler writes that schools are “obsessed with the primacy of the written word” and references their purpose as “social control in the interests of ruling elites” (see Graff 1987)” (Chandler, 1994, p.1).  Yet, he doesn’t provide supporting evidence for this argument or consider the benefits of literacy in schools.

Another bias that Chandler identifies is that Western culture is graphocentric because of a bias towards sight.  Although he goes to great lengths to explain that light is often associated with knowledge or intelligence, such as in the word ‘enlightenment,’ he fails to show a direct connection between an instinctual need to see with a preference of literacy over orality.

Chandler identifies several problematic areas in the ‘Great Divide’ theories and is able to present the ‘Continuity theories’ in a convincing manner.  He makes an important point, which is the need to realize that we all have biases.   Unfortunately, he is less convincing when he identifies them and actually ends up letting some of his own appear in Biases of the Ear and Eye.  Nevertheless, his observation of the effects of technical limitations and social context on the transition from orality to literacy is one that we should consider carefully as we continue our transition to a digital medium.

References

Chandler, D. (1994). Biases of the Ear and Eye: “Great Divide” Theories, Phonocentrism, Graphocentrism & Logocentrism.  Retrieved from http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/litoral/litoral.html

Collins, J. (1995). Literacy and Literacies.  Annual Review of Anthropology. 24, 75-93.  Retrieved from www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.an24.100195.000451

Daniell, B.  (1999). Narratives of Literacy: Connecting Composition to Culture. College Composition and Communication. 50, 393-410.  Retrieved from      http://www.jstor.org/stable/358858

Ong, Walter. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen.

This commentary is based on Grafton’s article FUTURE READING:“Digitization and its discontents” as referenced below. Grafton begins by describing Google’s aim to “build a comprehensive index of all books in the world …..some which envision a universal archive providing a basis for a total history of the human race.” The author comments that “the rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store and retrieve information efficiently.” The author then reviews past historical examples where libraries developed varied procedures in which to capture and reproduce text as they saw fit. In this opening statement, it appears that Grafton is questioning whether such an overload of information is currently a modern problem or issue? As in historical times, much information was created and gathered yet had to be stored and retrieved efficiently with libraries of the past and with of course currently Google. Why is there more of a focus on the current activities of Google and the digitization of books and documents as compared to the past? This may be explained by more recent technologies such as the Internet and of copyright issues.

Google currently scans books which are out of copyright and provides full text viewing and at the same scans copyright protected materials providing only small text samples for viewing. This process creates issues for the author provided s/he does not want to be part of the archive. Further, in scanning materials out of copyright and providing full public access, this would in a manner unfairly promote these documents while those in copyright would only be provided limited or negligible access for viewing. This would form an imbalance of text accessibility. Could this politics of the text be rectified or a greater equilibrium found? Over time however, Grafton states that as “more of this material emerges from copyright protection, we’ll be able to learn things about our culture that we could have never have known previously” which does prove beneficial for all.

Further, with the major push for book digitization led by Google, Microsoft and the companies of like, this begs the question of whether this is the beginning of the privatization of a public good? As with all businesses, they pursue interests which benefit their own corporation. How will the eventual archives of documents be used to drive or increase their revenue? Will there be subscriptions or paid access? Grafton notes that the “materials from the poorest societies may not attract companies that rely on subscriptions or on advertising for cash flow.” As a result, the material from these societies would be limited to their own and not for the world. This would “prove unfortunate because these societies have the least access to printed books and thus to their own literature and history.” Poverty then could rear its ugly head once again through not only lack of food but also in lack of print and accessibility. Grafton notes that “the Internet will do much to redress this imbalance, by providing Western books for non-Western readers but what it will do for non-Western books is less clear.” To this point, I do not completely agree in that in order to access the Internet, technologies need to be more widely available and in poorer nations, the need to address basic needs has a higher priority. Further, in providing Western books for non-Western readers could also negatively impart Western values and culture to non-Western readers.

While there are mixed reviews regarding the digitization of books, Grafton does note that this process has the advantage of “fast and reliable methods of search and retrieval.” As compared to historical times, Internet technologies are improving and radically changing the manner in which we store and retrieve information at greater levels. After all, “search is everything.” The ability to “tag” items and “link” items has changed the manner in which we store and view our information.

With that being said, Grafton notes that we still cannot discard the physical artifact itself. His reasoning includes “the form in which you encounter a text can have a huge impact on how you use it.” I agree with this notion as the material and how print is presented affects individuals differently. The material is not simply words but also allows the reader to view the environment and age in which it was created. The book itself tells a story beyond what words are written in it and therefore, we cannot discard the physical artifact itself.

While we are still currently early in the stages of book digitization, only time will tell how the archive of books and its varied accessibly will stand the test of time. Is the paper a better format for text preservation as in the past or has it’s time come to cede to that of a more current technology?

References:

Grafton, Anthony. (2007, 5 November). Future Reading:Digitization and its Discontents. The New Yorker.