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ACC2013New Media

Week 3The First Recorded ‘New Media’: Shifting from Orality to Literacy

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Lecture Overview

• Distinction between orality and literacy.

• Walter Ong and Orality.

• Emergence of literacy.

• Significance of literacy.– Writing and Power

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• Lecture: – We tend to think of the Internet and wireless connectivity as the new media

revolution but arguably it is a distant second to one of the most monumental moments in human history: when we were able to systematically record our thoughts for the first time. This was a decisive moment which marked an end to ‘pre-history’. Further, it fully transformed the possibilities for thought, knowledge production, and the organizational possibilities for politics, the economy, and cultural practices.

• Tutorial: – Analysis and discussion of the key characteristics of orality and literacy.

• Essential Reading:– Graff, H 1991, ‘The Origins of Western Literacy’, in The Legacies of Literacy,

Indiana University Press, Bloomington.– Ong, W 1982, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Some Psychodynamics of Orality’, in Orality and

Literacy, Routledge, New York, pp. 1-3; 31-57.– Hartley, J 2002, ‘Literacy’ and ‘Orality’, in Communication, Cultural and Media

Studies: The Key Concepts, Routledge, London, pp. 135-136; 169.

Week ThreeThe First Recorded ‘New Media’: Shifting from Orality to Literacy

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Course Details

• Coordinator/Tutor: Jonathan Yu• Email: jonathan.yu@vu.edu.au• Unit Blog: http://acc2013.wordpress.com/

• Unit Reader – Available now from book shop.

• Tutorials: – St Albans:

• 10:00-11:00am – Room 3N24• 11:00-12:00pm – Room 3N24 (Cancelled)

– Footscray Park: • 1:00-2:00pm – Room C226• 4:00-5:00pm – Room E319• 5:00-6:00pm – Room E319 (Cancelled)

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• “Humans, though they started out with the same formula as primates, can make tools as well as symbols, both of which derive from the same process or, rather, draw upon the same basic equipment in the brain .... As soon as there are prehistoric tools, there is a possibility of a prehistoric language, for tools and language are neurologically linked and cannot be dissociated within the social structure of mankind.” – Andre Leroi-Gourhan

• “[Writing is] a system of human intercommunication by means of conventional visible marks.”– I.J Gelb

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• “Civilization is unthinkable without writing.” – Lydia H. Liu

• “The sword and the pen worked together. Power was increased by concentration in a few hands, specialization of function was enforced, and scribes with leisure to keep and study records contributed to the advancement of knowledge and thought. The written record signed, sealed, and swiftly transmitted was essential to military power and the extension of government. Small communities were written into large states and states were consolidated into empire. The monarchies of Egypt and Persia and the Roman Empire and the city states were essentially products of writing.” – Harold Innis

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What is the difference between orality and literacy?

Orality• Oral societies are ones without an alphabet

or any visual representation of words.

• Primary orality is largely restricted to prehistory

– complete absence of literacy– no external traces of thought

• What about stone tools?

• Secondary Orality – Oral elements in our literate society.

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What is the difference between orality and literacy?

Literacy• Literate societies have alphabets

and thus visual representations of words.

• Literacy profoundly altered our ability to think, to produce knowledge, and to understand ourselves, those around us and the world in which we live.

• “[Literacy is] not directly native to human existence.” – Walter Ong

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Walter Ong

• Key Thinker: Walter Ong

• Graduate student of Marshall McLuhan.

• Diachronic analysis of orality and literacy.

• Key Text: Orality and Literacy (1982)

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Walter Ong on Orality

• Focus is primarily on alphabetic writing.

• Psychodynamics of orality:– Psychodynamics – Study of

psychological forces that impact on human behaviour.

– Ong was interested in how literacy alters our state of mind in everyday life.

• “Without writing, words have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual.”

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Walter Ong on Orality

• For Ong, the first step toward understanding orality is to rethink “the nature of sound itself as sound”.

– “Sound exists only when it is going out of existence…it is sensed as evanescent.”

• The moment we pronounce a word it goes out of existence.

• In Hebrew, the term for ‘word’ and ‘event’ are the same.

• In oral cultures, language is typically a mode of action

– Literate societies think of it as a system of representation.

• A truly oral society would have no sense of a word or a name as being something that can be seen.

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Orality and Memory• To ‘know’ something in oral culture requires you to

remember.– “You know what you can recall”– So you must “think memorable thoughts”.

• How do you recall things when you cannot write them down?

– use mnemonics – heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, repetition,

alliteration, assonance, etc– formulaic thought

• “The law itself in oral cultures is enshrined in formulaic sayings, proverbs, which are not mere jurisprudential decorations, but themselves constitute the law. A judge in an oral culture is often called on to articulate sets of relevant proverbs out of which he can produce equitable decisions in the cases under formal litigation before him.”

• To think in “non-formulaic, non-patterned, non-mnemonic terms” is a waste of time.

– The knowledge expressed would soon be forgotten.

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Characteristics of Oral Culture

• Additive rather than subordinative.– Lots of ‘ands’ i.e. “and… and…

and… and”– Not: “and… then… thus… while”

• Aggregative rather than analytic.– Not ‘soldier’ but ‘brave soldier’.– Not ‘princess’ but ‘beautiful

princess’.

• Be redundant.– i.e. lots of repetition.

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Characteristics of Oral Culture

• Conservative or traditional mindset.– Roles of wise elders.– Memory work is to ‘conserve’.

• Close to the human lifeworld.– Focused on the familiar human

interaction.

• Agonistically toned.– Knowledge situated within struggle.– Situated in a lifeworld of good and

evil, virtue and vice.

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Characteristics of Oral Culture

• Empathetic and participatory, not objectively distanced.– To ‘know’ in orality requires having an empathetic,

communal identification with the known.– Writing establishes conditions of objectivity.

• Homeostatic.– Knowledge lives in the present.– Kept in equilibrium. – Removing memories (words) that have no present

relevance.

• Situational not abstract. – Operational thinking, not conceptual thinking. – eg shape would be given a practical name, not an

abstract one (plate, not circle).

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Writing: The Emergence of LiteracyInitial Questions

1. What do we know of the origins of writing; and is it an inevitable and important question?

2. Is literacy central to political governance and imperialism (empire-building)?

3. What do we include with writing?

4. How did writing evolve from antiquity to the invention of print and mass media?

5. Is writing a visual representation of speech?

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The (Pre)History of Writing: Emergence of Literacy

• Writing emerged independently in:– Mesopotamia (Iraq)– Egypt– China– Mesoamerica (Aztecs/Mexico, Incas/Peru)

• Shared characteristics of each society:– agriculture– surplus economy– division of labour– urbanization

• Literacy – Myths and Magic.

• “Just as literacy is about access to power and upward social mobility in modern society, writing in ancient civilizations marked the social division between those who had access to knowledge and power and those who did not.” – Lydia Liu

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The (Pre)History of Writing: Emergence of Literacy

• Early uses of literacy:– Record keeping, law making, accumulating wealth, etc.

• The most prominent early ‘literate’ societies were Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome.

– Largely illiterate aside from Rome.

• For many centuries, writing remained largely a technical skill.

• Grammatology (I.J. Gelb)– Scientific study of literacy.– Thesis: Language develops from logographic scripts to

syllabaries to alphabets.

• Other factors:– Needs of bookkeeping.– Concepts of value, property and weight require symbols

and institutional support.

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Chronology of Literacy

• Evidence of symbolic representation dating back to about 40,000 BC.– Cave Paintings in France.

• Cultural or social function unknown.

• Enabled an increased ability to identify and remember an object or being– Picture as memory aids.– A record of things identified for

posterity.– Exteriorization of thought.

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Chronology of Literacy

• Around 3100 BC, a formalized system of writing emerged for the first time in Sumeria. – full-word syllabic system emerged for

the first time– symbolic representation of consonant-

vowel combinations (eg. ma, me, mo, mi, mu)

• First form of writing but not alphabet.

• Logogram or Ideogram– Logographic Systems eg Chinese

characters, Egyptian Hiroglyphs

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Chronology of Literacy

• The next stage is the correspondence between linguistic sounds and symbols.

• Long transition from syllabaries to the alphabet.

– Phoneticization – Enabled humans to express words and sounds that

can’t be represented by pictures or their combinations.

• Phonogram– Symbol that represents a speech sound.

• Alphabet– Simple system of symbolic representation.– Allows for the expression of every possible

linguistic utterance through consonant and vowel sounds.

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Writing and Power

• Literacy, from the beginning, was a tool of political, religious, and economic authority.

• Writing was used to:– Keep accounts for trading.– Enable more complex trade over larger

areas.– Allow for the expansion of property rights.– Enable control over the ‘secrets’ of

religion.

• Writing enabled accumulation of economic profit, centralized ownership and the expansion of state power.

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The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

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Lecture Summary

• Walter Ong and Orality.– “In an oral culture, restriction of words to

sound determines not only ways of expression but also thought processes.”

– Characteristics of oral culture.

• Emergence of literacy.– Key events in history and evolution.

• Significance of literacy.– Literacy and Power.– Tied to political, economic and social

requirements.