Awakening to the Astonishing Powers of

Speech and Writing

(re)

Whence did the wondrous, mystic art arise of painting speech, and speaking to the eyes?

That we, by tracing magic lines are taught how to embody, and to colour thought?

—William Massey (1763)

Speech &Writing: the overlooked

Parents of all disciplinesThough they are the sources of all subsequent technologies, today speech and writing are so ubiquitous that they become “naturalized” and slip beneath our consciousness in that we forget their great power.How and why this happens are aspects of

embodiment & desensitizationAny repeated experience can become unconscious and thus momentarily beyond our control while disengaged from our awareness.

To help re-sensitize & re-awaken to the power of writing, I offer the following reflections about human history & technology…

approximate **techno-timeline:

500,000 years ago

FIRE

3,500 years agoWRITING

600 years ago

PRINTING

50,000-100,000 years ago

IMAGES & SPEECH

** not to scale

5,000 years ago

WHEEL

the power of writing

Consider the level of cultural & technological complexity we

have generated since the advent of writing……in less than 5,000 years!And without writing, where would

these technologies be?

what’s the connection?Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – from club down to collaboration

In The Muse Learns to Write (1986)

Havelock explains the importance of the Greek Alphabet:

“…I had considered some of the acoustics involved in linguistic behavior and had traced the way in which the Greek symbols had succeeded in isolating with economy and precision the elements of linguistic sound and had arranged them in a short atomic table learnable in childhood. The invention for the first time made possible a visual recognition of linguistic phonemes that was both automatic and accurate.” (9)

McLuhan, media & sensory ratiosUnderstanding Media (1964)

As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree……“It helps to appreciate the nature of the spoken word to contrast it with the written form. Although phonetic writing separates and extends the visual power of words, it is comparatively crude and slow. There are not many ways of writing “tonight,” but Stravinsky use to ask his young actors to pronounce and stress it fifty different ways while the audience wrote down the different shades of feeling and meaning expressed….The written word spells out in sequence what is quick and implicit in the spoken word. ...The power of the voice to shape air and space into verbal patterns may well have been preceded by less specialized expressions of cries, grunts, and commands, of song and dance." (113-114)"The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology. There have been many kinds of writing, pictographic and syllabic, but there is only one phonetic alphabet in which semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds.....the ideogram is an inclusive gestalt, not an analytic dissociation of senses and functions like phonetic writing." (119-120)

But first, human anatomy had to change…It’s all about the SVT or supralaryngeal tract…

Fully developed human speech depends on specialized anatomy that appears to have evolved more recently in anatomically modern humans. The melding of individual sounds into syllables that yields the rapid transmission rate of human speech is an automatic consequence of the manner in which the airway above the larynx, the supralaryngeal vocal tract (SVT), modulates sound energy.

Lieberman, Philip. An Overview - supralaryngeal vocal tract, Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees, The Evolution of Communication

changes in the diameter of the SVT. These tongue maneuvers

produce the abrupt diameter changes needed to produce the

formant frequencies of the vowels found most frequently

among the world’s languages

“In normal adults these two portions of the SVT form aright angle to one another and are approximately equal inlength—in a 1:1 proportion. Movements of the tongue withinthis space, at its midpoint, are capable of producing tenfold changes in the diameter of the SVT.

These tongue maneuvers produce the abrupt diameter changes needed to produce the formant frequencies of the vowels found most frequentlyamong the world’s languages…”

“Tracking the Evolution of Language and Speech”Lieberman & McCarthy (2007)

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the

Word Walter J. Ong (1982)

…I style the orality of a culture totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print, ‘primary orality’. It is ‘primary’ by contrast with the 'secondary orality' of present-day high-technology culture in which a new orality is sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print. Today primary oral culture in the strict sense hardly exists, since every culture knows of writing and has some experience of its effects.” (11)

“Though it releases unheard-of potentials of the word, a textual, visual representation of a word is not a real word, but a ‘secondary modeling system’. Thought is nested in speech, not in texts all of which have their meanings through reference of the visible symbol to the world of sound. What the reader is seeing on the page are not real words but coded symbols whereby a properly informed human being can evoke in his or her consciousness real words, in actual or imagined sound." (74)

approximate **techno-timeline:

500,000 years ago

FIRE

3,500 years agoWRITING

600 years ago

PRINTING

50,000 years ago

IMAGES & SPEECH

** not to scale

5,000 years ago

WHEEL

the power of writing

7 years agoWEB 2.0

Digital writing is composition…

Strictly speaking, digital writing or using computers to compose, has existed since before the inception of the Web, but until 2004 online composition was mostly limited to expert coders and web builders. Web 2.0 represents an explosion of online software programs and other social media that made digital writing much easier to use without technical expertise or extensive training.

Traditional compositional concerns and practices still apply, but the digital writer has a vast array of expressive options, requiring a greater level of close attention to context, audience and purpose.

super e x p a n d e denhancedaugmentedWritin

g Goes DIGITAL

words can also shape us…

Negative self-talk = self-created failureMantra = mind tool Write a positive script

psychologically & physically

What is my internal narrative?

inside & outside

Am I too old for college? Never: intellectual challenge will “grow your brain”

Yes! neuroplasticity + challenge = neurogenesissee The Wisdom Paradox by Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg

Can I learn new technologies?

In Understanding Media, McLuhan reminds us that the alphabet, like all technologies, has significant invisible drawbacks, one of which is the subtle way it limits rather than encourages fluency…

•Fixes ephemeral phonemes•Written in stone•Engraved invitation•Grammar hawks•Self-doubt•Hesitation/Procrastination•Technophobia•Rigid linearity •Perfectionism

Words can cause OR unlock the dreaded WRITER’S BLOCK

“Certainly the lineal structuring of rational life by phonetic literacy has involved us in an interlocking set of consistencies …Perhaps there are better approaches along quite different lines; for example, consciousness is regarded as the mark of a rational being, yet there is nothing lineal or sequential about the total field of awareness that exists in any moment of consciousness.”

Vygotsky’s ZPD, Digital Natives & Digital Immigrants

A key to drawing out student potential is the concept of the “zone of proximal development” or ZPD conceived in the early 20th Century by pioneering cognitive psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Briefly stated, the ZPD is that experience in learning when the student is given sufficient challenge in his assignments that he cannot succeed without some guidance from the teacher. An effective assignment is not so easy as to insult the student and be dismissed, nor is it so difficult as to discourage and crush the student with inevitable failure. The ZPD is that fine but shifting balance between these two pedagogical extremes, a balance that maximizes learning and requires an attentive and flexible approach from the teacher.

Marc Prensky’s insightful metaphor of “digital natives” quite useful in helping us to negotiate unprecedented changes in communication. Unlike the techno-evangelist who uncritically discards the old and embraces the new, we can remind the traditional student “digital natives” that elder knowledges are still relevant, useful and reliable. As “digital immigrants” we are empowered to encourage and teach returning adult students who may need a guide for their immigration experience. Our help with the tech-know learning curve helps create a ZPD to maximize student growth.

Liberal Arts = Diversity of Knowledge

“The work that currently captures our fancy involves high technology, electronic media, and "symbolic analysis.”… associated with advanced education, and there is no doubt that work of this type requires high levels of analytic skill. What concerns me, though, is the implication—evident in popular discourse about work—that so-called older types of work, like manufacturing or service work, are, by and large, mindless, "neck down" rather than "neck up." ....But, though identified with another era, work of body and hand continues to create the material web of daily life. As with any human achievement, such work merits our understanding; the way we talk about it matters. And the dimension of it that is least discussed and appreciated—and that we can continue to learn from—is the thought it takes to do it well.”

Mike Rose The Mind at Work (2004)

The chief and unique value of a Liberal Arts education is not in supposed “mastery” of content knowledge, but rather the exposure to and experimentation with a variety of disciplines, perspectives, priorities, value systems, and production expectations. Because of this, the experience, intelligence and contribution of all members of the campus community should be included in the conversation, whether traditional student, staff or lifelong scholar.

Thinking, Writing, Process & Portfolio

The Conversation Model & “the academy”

brainstormingfreewriting

pre-WRITING =

outlinesmapping

discussion

PROCESS / PORTFOLIO writing

Portfolio = drafting, collecting, revising & presenting your work

Drafting & Revision…

1. Assignment/desire/exigency

2. pre-writing notes

3. Rough Draft

4. First Draft

5. WORKSHOP

6. Second Draft

7. WRITING CONSULTATION

8. Third Draft

9. FINAL FEEDBACK

10. “Final” Draft

“revision”= re-seeing, reimagining, reinventing – SIGNIFICANT change.

Digital Writing: programs for AUDIO composition…

5 min. intro video made with “iShowU HD” – click screen below to begin.

Image editing programs…Even the face of death can be transformed with GIMP freeware

Wikis are ideal for drafting & collaboration

3 min. intro video made with “iShowU HD” – click screen below to begin.

Virtual House of Usher collaboration in Second Life online simulation

Virtual House of Usher – creative writing & nonfiction research

*simulation no longer active in SL – see “The Fall: Digital House of Usher” video tour

Resources Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Translated by John Wilkinson.

New York: Vintage Press, 1964.  Gee, James Paul. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses 3rd ed.

London: Routledge, (1990) 2008.

Lieberman, Philip and Robert McCarthy. “Tracking the Evolution of Language and Speech: Comparing Vocal Tracts to Identify Speech Capabilities.” Expedition vol. 49, no. 2,

2007. pp. 15-20

Lieberman, Philip. An Overview - supralaryngeal vocal tract, Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees, The Evolution of Communication

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: the extensions of man. (1964) ed. Terence Gordon. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982.

Vygotsky, Lev. Thought and Language. ed. Alex Kozulin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986