CW 2007: Session 8.2: Orality and Literacy 2.0
Computers and Writing 2007 ends my series of conference sessions marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Orality and Literacy. Here’s the program information, slightly edited, for Orality and Literacy 2.0 (session 8.2):
Orality and Literacy 2.0
Saturday, May 19, 3:45 – 5:00 PM, Room B
Sound in Text: Lost Jokes and Secondary Orality 2.0 (Patricia Sullivan, Purdue University)
As students of Walter Ong may assert, his sense of humor was dry, and often language-based. Father Ong punned and played with language, often embedding jokes in his books and essays. Too many of these jokes are lost on readers who have not heard Ong speak, who did not laugh along with his witty and wry turns of phrase.
One such instance of sound in text is Ong’s Foreword to Pedro Lain Entralgo’s 1970 The Therapy of the Word in Classical Antiquity (1970). Ong’s joking centers on the immediacy of sound, punning and playing on the connection between hearing both the word “buffalo” and the sounds the animal itself would make. “Buffalo:” hearing the word is not the same as hearing the animal, and hearing the name of the animal is not the same as hearing the animal. These tendrils of sound, echoing through Ong’s text and in our readings, represent the layers of interpretation separating us from the visceral experience, as I am limited in this proposal to describing the hair-raising experience of feeling the buffalo’s breath rather than feeling my hair stand on end, my heart pump, the rush of adrenaline, accompanying the realization that here is a buffalo. “If he hears a buffalo, he had better watch out: something is going on. No other sensory field has this dynamism which marks the field of sound.”
So on this anniversary of Ong’s Orality and Literacy, let us not forget the layers of interpretation, of symbolization and interpretation, that already separate the literate mind from the visceral experience, and consider both the symbolic verbal mastery of the scholar as he taught us to appreciate the beauty of the word in its many manifestations, the power of the word, and the power of the unmediated sound that washes over our skin, raising gooseflesh and releasing adrenaline, inspiring us to not to reflection and inner analysis but animal response to fight or flight. As the computers and writing community adds sound: music, noise,ambiance, and feedback, to multimodal texts, let us recall Ong’s work with sound in the text.
My Blog and My Essay Sound Different, or the Presence of Orality in Our Written Word (Gina Merys, Creighton University)
What this presentation advocates is training our ears to hear the polyphony of voices that is at once background noise and the source of power for students learning how to use language in all of its modes for all of its rhetorical purposes; genuine vocality that becomes textual space in this complex layered sense of order.
Because textuality depends so much on orality, and vice versa, it is counter-productive to separate these two modes of communicating when looking at the palimpsestic nature of classroom language. In fact, as Walter Ong states in Orality and Literacy, in literate cultures orality depends on textuality because “once the chirographically initiated feel for precision and analytic exactitude is interiorized, it can feed back into speech, and does” (103). Further, what I argue is that the ways in which students internalize the “sound” of oral communication shows up to different degrees in their writing. Thus, they hear the way they sound in their writing and approve or disapprove of that writing according to how much or how little it relates to the way they speak. While they enjoy hearing the text of their online writing, they tend to distance that voice in academic writing often to the detriment of meaning. Hence, if students could learn to use their orality in all types of writing, they could more easily learn about effective communication.
Convergence: Bridging the Oral-Visual Divide (Andrea Murphy, Old Dominion University)
Human communication can be thought of as a mixture of the oral and the visual. Primary orality exists within a context of face-to-face communication. Although the inventions of writing and subsequently print moved communication into a visual and spatial context, it remained fundamentally dependent on language. Finally, with the advent of secondary orality, prompted by such inventions as radio and television, communication took a turn back towards the oral, albeit a self-conscious and deliberate orality reliant on print. However, new advances in technology must prompt either an altered definition of secondary orality or the invention of a new term altogether.
Later in life, Walter Ong (in “Information and/or Communication”) defined “secondary orality” as being an age where orality itself is accorded, through the machines made possible by writing and print, the permanence and reproducibility found previously only in more visual mediums. This paper argues that it is this definition of “secondary orality” that points towards a future not of oral-visual contrasts, but instead one marked by a convergence of oral and visual modes of communication.
With the advent of the Internet and digital mediums, this age of “secondary orality” is becoming one where it possible for a single person to potentially communicate with billions synchronically and diachronically, drawing on the sense of immediacy grained in orality as well as the informational dense visual complexity afforded through hypermedia. Nevertheless, the audiences created by these new media are fundamentally limited, not by the range of the speaker’s voice as in the era of primary orality, but by the interests and attention span of the individual founded in print.
Editing the Sound-text: Waveform Alphabet as Orality and Literacy 2.0 (Michael Salvo, Purdue University)
While using Audacity to clean up a recorded lecture, I realized that I was visually manipulating sound files, that I was editing visual sound-wave form representations of speech in Audacity. In other words, I had stopped listening to the sound files and was visually editing the aural text. I had begun removing speech stammers — all the “um,” “uh,” “oh”, “er,” and pauses that had become visually distinguishable from words and other sounds, sounds that I wanted to save as content. I was, techno-visually, playing with sound and editing text, actually, editing speech. Later in the day, I was able to clean up the tense inconsistencies by recognizing the addition of “ess” or S.
Audacity is but one example of a class of sound-manipulation tools, Garageband among them, that create a visual representation of the sound waveform to aid in sound editing. Visually representing this sonic waveform adds another in a series of symbols for the spoken word, another layer of the technologized word. Ong might be excited, might be puzzled, but certainly would be interested in this new waveform alphabet that Audacity and Garageband use to enable the further symbolization of the word, offering a new waveform alphabet for the manipulation of speech, a new alphabet alongside ancient symbol systems. From one phoneme emerges a tale of secondary orality, a further site of the technologization of the word, and an alphabetic system supporting multimodal composing. This is a post-textual literate symbol system.
This presentation will introduce Audacity as a site for the development of this waveform alphabet, as an example of the further technologization of the word, as we move towards multimodal, post-textual literacy.
Cross posted to Notes from the Walter J. Ong Collection.
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