Do Audio Recordings Imitate Oral Culture?
In Writing Space, Bolter describes the shift from one medium to another as remediation which “involves both homage and rivalry, for the new medium imitates some features of the older medium, but also makes an implicit or explicit claim to improve on the older one”. Ong’s (1982) investigation on oral cultures relies on the idea of a gradual remediation; early literature will contain more artifacts of oral culture than newer texts. The relatively recent invention of audio recording devices and loudspeakers may have occurred much later than the transition from orality to literacy but the medium of recorded audio bears some similarities to our oral roots and could be another transition worthy of study. Undoubtedly, our recorded audio experiences are shaped by centuries of literacy; I can’t imagine a radio program that does not rely on reading and writing. However, listening to a radio broadcast has some similarities to listening to a live orator; the sounds and words the listener hears can not be taken back or edited. The speaker may call upon writing to deliver the message but the message is oral. Characteristics of the scroll have also crept in recorded audio.
Some advantages and disadvantages of the scroll can be compared to the cassette tape of the 1980’s. The cassette tape is essentially a scroll made of magnetic tape that the cassette player reads and amplifies so the listener can hear it. The speed that a user can read the scroll or listen to a cassette is limited by the technology, a spinning motion controls the speed and direction in both technologies. Both technologies require the spinning mechanism to work sequentially, this means a linear experience without an effective way to skip ahead or leap backwards to specific portions of the message. What I find curious is that it took a significant amount of time for codex producers to add indexes or page numbers to utilize the searchability advantage of the book (Hurtado, 2013). Indexes and page numbers have been a characteristic of the codex ever since, clearly an advantage worth utilizing, yet the cassette tape was pursued and largely successful at replacing the vinyl or wax record which was far better at indexing and searching. Perhaps portability trumps searchability; most forms of communication previous to the telegraph involved the physical transportation of the message, do we still make this association?
Scrolling is still prominent within electronic texts despite this limitation of poor searchability. There has yet to be a standardized solution to this functional issue. Hyperlinked indexes, search bars, and page based sites are common ways electronic texts provide this functionality. The following article describes a new application that is being developed to tackle this issue when using a touchscreen device.
http://www.xda-developers.com/scroll-me-up-and-down-xda-xposed-tuesday/
I’m not sure I would use the shortcuts this application adds to the touchscreen in my usual uses of electronic text, but it shows that we seem to have trouble preventing this limitation of speech and the scroll from invading our new text technologies.
Bolter, J. D. (2000). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Hurtado, L. (2013, August 1). Early Christians & the Codex: A Correction/Clarification (Web Log Post). Retrieved From https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/early-christians-the-codex-a-correctionclarification/
Ong, Walter. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen
Hi Brendan,
Your comment about radio broadcasting and its similarity to listening to a live speaker made me think about how online communication is more like a live conversation than it is like written text. Words written in social media, texts, or emails, are also difficult to take back. We teach in digital literacy classes the importance of carefully wording what you write it can be interpreted in different ways. Unlike formal written text, most people write online communications similar to how they speak. We do not write in complete, carefully worded sentences, but quick, colloquial text similar to our speech. Many people comment on how technology is inhibiting conversation and social behavior, but I tend to disagree. Though it may not be face-to-face communication, I feel like I have more contact with people now. Through social media I am able to “talk” with more. I feel much more connected to people. Sometimes even too much so as I feel that I am never out of reach to my children or husband! Perhaps face-to-face communication suffers some, but if we honestly think of our own teenage years, did we really spend much time talking to our parents?
I was also interested in your point about the prominence of scrolling and hyperlinking. One of the points that I found interesting in “The Electronic Labyrinth” was how it says “it is just as possible to see the Bible as the model of hypertext as it is of The Book” (Keep, n.d., The Bible, para.4). It is certainly an interesting perspective on the non-linearity of the Bible!
Keep, C., McLaughlin, T., & Parmar, R. (1995). The electronic labyrinth.*
Available: http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0261.html
Brendan in response to your post where you said “listening to a live orator; the sounds and words the listener hears cannot be taken back or edited” I understand your point of view but I am more pro towards verbal communication. Though I know that writing validates author’s thoughts and credibility as it is a planned and deliberate process. Let me put it this way that when we speak or listen we are usually looking at someone else, however when we write we are mainly looking at ourselves. Here I agree to Ong (pg.78), writing is unnatural.
In this digital age written form of communication is very popular especially through texting and benefiting from different social networking sites as one can stay in touch with friends and family but at the same time I feel that nothing can replace face to face or oral communication. When people talk face to face the connection they make is vital and irreplaceable. One of the biggest benefit which I see in oral communication is personalization and the response time. Here it is interesting to note that when we humans communicate we not only send and receive oral message but we also send/receive nonverbal message. As we hear a tone of voice or look into someone’s eyes, we can exactly become aware of what the other person mean. From my personal experience I have seen people sitting in the same room texting to each other rather than talking. I have noticed that people feel compelled to respond immediately via text messages in which they aren’t really participating in an ongoing, progressively deepening conversation. Isn’t that sad!! Though social technologies have broken the barriers of space and time but sometimes I feel that this medium can also be unpredictable and deceiving where people can hide behind the text in which they can project and create an illusion or image of their choice.
Refrence;
Ong, Walter. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen
I appreciate the link you have made between orality and music. When reading the earlier module on orality I thought about where music might fit into the picture as I think music is as old as mankind itself. Of course, early music is not as structured as it is today but many similarities to oral culture are evident in music – repetition, strong rhythmic nature, agonistic tone, it?s based on subjective experiences. Possibly these characteristics are why that song gets stuck in your head, or why you remember the lyrics to songs years later. Students are frequently told to remember something by creating a song (or mnemonic) in order to remember it.
Before the cassette tape of the 80s there was the reel-to-reel tape and the 8 track tape as well. These were also ‘scrolling’ type technologies. It was definitely difficult to find a particular point on the tape without the appropriate device to assist you. Cassette players eventually evolved so that you could advance to the next song quickly. The one difference I see between recorded audio and orality is the ability to alter the recorded audio, much like what we do digitally today. It is true that oral language is not retractable – once it is said it cannot be retracted; however, with audio recordings, these can be recorded ‘live’ but later edited into a polished product thus effectively bypassing the immediacy and ?retractability? of the spoken word. It seems to me this is just another way that we have come up with to control what we are communicating.
It is interesting that the concept of scrolling has made its way back into society. With all the disadvantages of the papyrus scroll I find it rather interesting that we are reinvented the ?scroll? in many ways. While doing my research on the papyrus scroll for assignment 2 I came across a teacher (Middlebrook, 2007) who advocates for the use of the ?scroll? , or text mapping as he calls it. He says it gives the students the advantage of seeing the whole picture at a glance. http://www.textmapping.org/scrolls.html
Middlebrook, R. D. (2007). The Textmapping Project. [Webpage]. Retrieved from http://www.textmapping.org/scrolls.html