6 Responses to “Orality and Web 2.0”

1. John Walter
   December 25th, 2006 » 1:11 pm

   “To sum up then:

   orality = dialogues bound by time and space
   literacy = monologues that transcend time and space
   digital culture = dialogues that transend time and space”

   This construction seems too reductive to me. In what way are dialogues and monologues limited to orality and literacy respectively? Surely you’ve overheard, or been in, a “conversation” that was really nothing more than a monologue, that had no back and forth exchange but was just some bore blathering on. Likewise, you’ve surely come across dialogical writing. Have you never conducted a conversations on paper on an occasion when talking was not appropriate? And what about letters? People have been carrying on conversations via letters for a few thousand years now.

   We must also consider the fact that people use writing to dialogue with themselves, to externalize their thoughts so that they can analyze and process what they can’t work out or work out as easily in their head. Likewise, we should also consider that the fact that one can be in conversation with a written or printed text. One can read a text and respond to it. One can even ask a written text questions and get an answers. Or one might read a series of texts which exist in dialogue with each other. Consider, for example, reading someone’s collected letters, which often include letters to and from, or a debate that takes place in the pages of one or more academic journals.

   While oral and written modes of communication do have affordances and constraints, there is nothing inherently dialogic or monologic about them. And, likewise, there is nothing inherent about the digital that makes it monologic or dialogic either.

   Whether an utterance, be it oral, written, or digital, is a monologue or a dialogue depends upon the sender and the receiver. Person X can ask as many questions as he or she wants or can offer as many chances for Person Y to enter into a conversation, but if Person Y refuses, Person X is, in effect, involved with a monologue. Moreover, whether or not Person X intends a monologue in speech or in writing, if Person Y responds, then there has been dialogue however brief it may be. And, finally, a dialogue can breakdown into two or more monologues if the parties involved stop listening to and engaging with one another.

   Another serious problem I find with this construction is the conflation of medium and materiality (what we might call media dynamics) with the mode of communication. Digitality refers to the medium and the materiality of the communication, not its mode. Digital communication can be oral, written, or both. The digitality of that communication means it has a different set of affordances and constraints than do other forms or oral and written communication.

   What’s cool about Web 2.0 technologies is that we’re starting to better understand and make better use of the media dynamics of networked digitality. Networked digitality can foreground presence and immediacy in ways that chirographic and typographic communication rarely do because of their affordances and constraints: while a conversation via handwritten letter can take weeks or months and a conversation conducted through periodicals and books can take months if not years, conversations online can take hours and minutes. This means there is an affordance for dialogue, but there’s also an affordance for grandstanding, trolling, flaming, and misunderstanding that face-to-face dialogue doesn’t have.

2. John
   December 29th, 2006 » 11:18 am

   Hello John,

   thanks for taking the time to respond to my post.

   You argue that speech is no more dialogical than writing, and as one proof you offer examples of written ‘conversations’ (i.e. the exchange of letters and texts that exist ‘in dialogue’ with each other). I’m quite willing to acknowledge that literacy facilitates innumerable literate ‘conversations’ (in the broadest sense) but my main point is that the nature of these conversations is fundamentally different from spoken dialogues. In fact they are so different as to be much more like serial monologues than anything else.

   You argue that conversations are about ’sender and receiver’ regardless of medium, but do you really think that my ability to stand in a library and to effortlessly ignore thousands of written conversational gambits (read me! read me!) is comparable to the intense interpersonal challenge of ignoring even one living person saying to you, “Excuse me…can I have a word?” The nature of the exchange is always, inevitably, fundamentally different. The act of ignoring a person speaking to you cannot be compared to the act of ignoring a book. Speech is embodied and immediate whereas writing is disembodied and remote. Speech is public while writing is private. Speech is loud while writing is silent. Speech is alive, texts are inanimate. Speech is always defined by context, texts are defined by their ability to transcend contexts. Writing is essentially anonymous, whereas speech is essentially an act of self-identification. They are basically opposites.

   You also attempt to prove that orality can be monological, by citing the example of people who either refuse to listen or who speak without caring whether others are listening (de facto monologues). In both cases these are widely considered to be abusive uses of speech and are given little respect in society. Yes speech can be monological but that is a technological pathology and not the norm. It seems to me an irrelevant point. Speech is given meaning by the act of listening. Writing is inward-looking. It is given meaning not by the act of reading but by the writing itself. If you see someone sitting in a cafe writing diligently you think, ah, he or she is doing something meaningful. If you see someone else sitting in a cafe talking to him or herself at length, you think, ah, he or she is crazy. The difference is obvious.

   I have heard these critiques many times before. They are always made by individuals who are highly invested in literacy and who refuse to believe that oral communication dynamics can be significantly different than their own. My experience, however, over a period of many years now, is that when my basic position is explained to oralists, they are in emphatic agreement about the inherent differences between oral and literate communication. They understand intuitively that their way of engaging with language, with each other, with knowledge, with the world - is rooted in a different communication experience, a different way of articulating relationships, ideas, possibilities, needs, and more.

   In your comment you use words like affordance, restraint, medium, materiality and mode in ways that suggest other people should have some idea what they mean. Frankly, I don’t think they do. I know I don’t. It’s academic jargon and I try to avoid jargon wherever possible. (For that matter so did Ong). I try to talk about the way people really live orality and the way people really live literacy, and to describe what I see.

   Like you I think that time and duration are important here, and I also agree that one can write as a dialogue with oneself. I believe that communication is always about narrating one’s own reality. The choice of medium, however, determines whether that narration is experienced as the discrete product of a discrete individual or as part of a flow, and of a community that is present and listening.

   And all of this matters in the context of Web 2.0 precisely because networked communications are - like orality - all about flow, and about community.
   I hope our conversation continues. Regards,
   John

3. John Walter
   December 31st, 2006 » 4:03 am

   John,

   You misunderstand me. I agree with you that there are great differences between oral communication and written communication–those words like materiality, affordances, constraints, medium, and mode help define what those differences are. While those words are jargon, that is, they are specialized terms, it does not mean we should not use them. Ong, by the way, did use academic jargon all the time. In Orality and Literacy alone we find such academic jargon as primary orality, secondary orality, print culture, closure, hermeneutics, noetics, lifeworld, psychodynamics, verbomotor, chirographic, pragmatics, irony, and backlooping.

   And I agree with you that much of text-based Web 2.0 foregrounds (affords) aspects of communication we traditionally associate with the oral such as the flow (what John Miles Foley calls pathways. The fact of the matter is, however, that text-based Web 2.0 is not oral–it’s written. And that’s what I’m getting at: orality and literacy are not binaries that can be easily blocked off into their separate categories.

   I do disagree with you that orality and literacy are, essentially, opposites, if by opposites you mean things like fire and water or water and oil. The problem, you see, is that we have things like residual orality and various levels of textuality/textualization, secondary orality, and secondary literacy and secondary visualism, all terms Ong himself used if not coined. In other words, while “pure” orality and “pure” literacy may exist at opposite ends, they intersect and mix in various ways that complicate their being called opposites. The elements of orality you find in text-based Web 2.0, and the elements in text-based online communication John December and many others, including myself, have been discussing for well over a decade, are but the most recent example of this interaction. Again, it is the affordances and constraints of particular mediums, materialites, and modes that dictate how all this plays out.

   I do agree with you that “The act of ignoring a person speaking to you cannot be compared to the act of ignoring a book.” As Ong liked to say, you can see and smell and touch a buffalo and not be in danger (a dead buffalo can be seen, smelled, and touched), it’s when you can hear the buffalo that you know you have a presence to contend with.
   However, I don’t entirely agree with the rest of that paragraph. You write:

   -”Speech is embodied and immediate whereas writing is disembodied and remote.” We can and do disembody speech through recordings and loudspeakers, radio, streaming audio, and telephones, and we ignore speech in places like buses and cafes all the time. Likewise, writing is not always disembodied (voiced texts are embodied, and there’s much work done in Composition Studies on embodiment and writing), and writing is not always remote (a text message sent to my by my wife right before I go into an interview is anything but remote on the human level of personal contact — yes, she may be a thousand miles away, but it has immediacy and presence for me. And I don’t know about you, but I can hear people’s voices in letters. And, of course, you’re argument that text-based Web 2.0 has flow and is about community depends upon the idea that some writing is not remote.

   -”Speech is public while writing is private.” Speech is not always public — we talk to ourselves all the time. Just because we don’t speak the words out loud doesn’t mean that we’re not speaking. Likewise, a lot of writing is public. Your blog and my response, for instance, or articles printed in a newspaper. Letters to the editor are often public writing in the realist sense of that phrase.

   -”Speech is loud while writing is silent.” People ignore speech all the time. Even loud speech. If not one pays attention to a speech act, is it really loud even when it’s shouted? Likewise, writing can speak much louder than the spoken word. Ben Franklin, to use an American touchstone, tried speaking to Parliament and he was chastised and treated as if he was a willful child needing to be put in his place (the language used Parliament, in fact). Franklin was heard, but his speech wasn’t loud. The Declaration of Independence, however, that got their attention. That written text spoke much louder than Franklin’s spoken appeals. And, of course, texts can be and are read aloud–some are even intended to be read aloud.

   -”Speech is alive, texts are inanimate.” Is a pre-recorded spoken performance any more “alive” than a text? I guess one should ask here if by orality you mean face-to-face communication (or, maybe, real-time oral communication), because there are many kinds of orality, which again brings us to issues of medium, materiality, and mode….

   -”Speech is always defined by context, texts are defined by their ability to transcend contexts.” No. There is no meaning without context, either for speech or for texts. You and I can have a conversation and you can say something in that conversation that is completely relevant to the discuss as far as you are concerned but will have no meaning whatsoever for me because I are unaware of its context. However, I’m guessing here that by context, you mean that speech is rooted to the time and place of its utterance and texts aren’t, which is a different kind of context. Yes and no. We can record speech, which allows us to save that speech and play it back. If you visit the audio archive of the Walter J. Ong Collection you can listen to a lecture Ong gave in 1984. In that recording, you can hear the give and take of question and answer period following the formal talk. It’s speech, but it has transcended time and space just as much as any written text has. On the other hand, however, we do have written texts that we have not been able to decode. While those texts exist, because we cannot decode them, they have not transcended their context, at least for now.

   -”Writing is essentially anonymous, whereas speech is essentially an act of self-identification.” Again, I have to disagree. This is just too categorical, too reductionist, too theoretically abstract to be of practical use. While writing can be anonymous, speech can be anonymous too. And we can identify people by their writing. Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto is one such example of writing being anything but anonymous. And if you think Kaczynski’s an exception, you’ve not read much Hemingway or James Joyce, or, for that matter, a semester’s worth of writing in a first-year composition class. While we can mask our writing or shape it’s tone to reflect our needs (just was we can mask our voices or shape their tone), our writing can be used to identify us as much as our voices can. And some of the earliest examples of writing we have was for the purposes of self-identification, and people today write for the purposes of self-identification all the time.

   With all of these statements I’m quoting, I do understand what you’re getting and, fundamentally, on some level, I agree with you. But, at the same time, these issues are much more complex, much less black or white or either-or than you’re representing them. And that’s what I was trying to get at in my earlier post.

   Fundamentally, I agree with your sense of what Web 2.0 is doing, but I do think the above post focuses too closely on surface issues–the outward manifestations of particular contexts (contexts here including but not limited to issues of medium, materiality, and mode–rather than the deeper structures that shape and define those surface issues.

   Case in point: orality, in Ongian terms, includes primary orality, face-to-face spoken communication, secondary orality, recorded and broadcast speech, and various levels of residual orality in textualization.

   In your initial post, and what I was primarily responding to, was the formula:

   “orality = dialogues bound by time and space
   literacy = monologues that transcend time and space
   digital culture = dialogues that transend time and space”

   Orality meaning oral culture is not the same thing as oral communication; Literacy is not the same chirographic culture or print culture or textualization or written communication; and digital culture is not the same thing as Web 2.0 or email or chat. I can perform/engage the psychodynamics of digitality with pen and paper just as one can, did, and do write in an oral tradition.

   I don’t mean to sound like I’m an expert on this. I’m not. These are issues I’ve been thrashing out for a decade or so and I still haven’t resolved it to my liking. Ong and I talked about this once, in 1998 or 1999, about the immediacy and presence in text-based online communication, and after we defined the issue as we understood it, I said “I’m not sure what to make of it yet,” and Ong replied “I’m not either.” We sat in silence for a 10 seconds or so, and then one of us changed the topic because we’d clearly played that issue out. I’ve got a much better sense of the issue now, but I still don’t have it all figured out.

   Best,

   John

4. Sean Reid
   January 1st, 2007 » 10:15 pm

   John, I enjoyed reading this post and the subsequent literary dialogue between you and John W…Wait, is that even possible?

   I am pulling for you on this framework, but like John W., I see some grey areas that are too large to ignore.

   I’ve been a speech writer by trade for over 10 years now. It is a unique form of writing that demands an “oral” perspective from the writer. While the construction of the speech may be a private enterprise, the oral delivery of that written text is, by necessity, public. Also, while their are some “town hall” exceptions, most speeches are largely monological, not dialogical, when delivered orally. Also, where does audio recording fall into this mix? Kennedy’s Inaugural address transcends time and place as a literary masterpiece. Thanks to audio (and video) recording, it also transcends time and place as an oral masterpiece. There are countless other great speeches that follow this similar mould.

   Does your framework need a bit further tightening to more crisply address some of these grey spots??

   Thanks again for initiating this discussion!

5. John
   January 2nd, 2007 » 9:52 am

   Sean, ‘writing for the podium’ presents a writer with a specific set of challenges. You have to ‘hear’ your words in a very different way than you do in other kinds of writing. So yes it’s a balancing act. But even if a speaker expects his or her speech to be a monologue, there is always the very real possibility of interruption, either of the positive or negative variety. People can boo, cheer, heckle, etc. That is a dialogical situation that a good speaker will always address. I’m sure you have seen that when speakers ignore the feelings of their audiences (again, positive or negative) that people get annoyed, just as they would when being ignored in any conversation. I’d argue that writers write speeches as monologues-for-the-ear but that the reality of the oral environment always intrudes. And if it doesn’t that’s simply because the rules of the exchange have been tightened so much that people are intimidated into silence (think of Bush’s press conferences) or else because it is an event staged for the media. And that brings us to your second point (Kennedy’s recordings and the question of electronic voices) which I’m going to answer shortly in a response to John regarding his critique of my position.

   Anyway, thanks for both your comments, Sean. I’m glad you got a kick out of my 1st post.

6. John
   January 2nd, 2007 » 1:41 pm

   Hi John. I’m going to offer a short(ish) response to your comment here. I’ll be outlining my position in many more posts going forward so I hope you’ll check back and continue commenting. Our topic obviously fascinates both of us…

   I think we disagree on a couple of levels. First of all I do not accept the way you consistently equate spoken words with recordings of spoken words, or words written on paper with words that are distributed as binary code. Despite your caveat at the end of your post that you do not know what to make of these questions, based on many statements in your critique you are unwilling to grant that there is any fundamental difference between them. This is confirmed when you conclude that “I can perform/engage the psychodynamics of digitality with pen and paper just as one can, did, and do write in an oral tradition.”

   As I suggested in my response to Sean re: speechwriting, one may be able to engage with the psychodynamics of orality via print but only in a reductive, imitative and tentative way. Again it seems to me that your perspective is rooted in an allegiance to literate values and that your refusal to distance oral and literate dynamics from one another is a consequence of your ‘booklearning’. In my experience literates are extremely reluctant to admit that oral communication dynamics offer and insist on ways of knowing that can never be transliterated into text.
   Although you are doing your best not to patronize me when you gently explain that these are much more complex issues than I realize, the fact of the matter is that I’ve traveled around the world searching out oral masters and studying with them for a couple of decades now. So when I talk about how oral communication is different from literate communication, I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who has not only read most of the scholarly literature on the subject (I bought Ong’s Orality and Literacy in London in 1989 when I was doing research in the BBC archives on the earliest recordings of the spoken word, and it has been a bible ever since) but also as someone who has a deep personal knowledge of oral cultures as a performer, student, educator, producer, curator, etc. And I’m not saying that to blow my horn but rather because I do not believe that one can discuss oral cultures with real insight unless one has engaged with them on a very deep level. Have you, I wonder? My guess is not, but I’m ready to be corrected if I’m wrong.

   In terms of a deeper answer to your question (and Sean’s) about the relation of spoken words to electronic words, I wrote extensively about this in my book Digitopia Blues - Race, Technology and the American Voice (Banff Centre Press, 2002) but I will be elaborating much more on it in future posts on this blog.

   As I said, I welcome comments from one and all, so feel free to fire back.

   regards,
   j

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About John Sobol

I’m a Senior Consultant at 76design, one of Canada’s hipper interactive agencies and this blog is about the conversation economy and the power of peer-to-peer storytelling. To see where I’ve been visit www.johnsobol.com. To find out where we’re all going – and why – stick around. My answers matter.

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