Category Archives: Quotes

The OHM Thesis

04 Sunday May 2008

Posted by in Marshall McLuhan, Media Ecology, Quotes, Walter Ong

≈ 6 Comments

From Vincent Casaregola’s “The Text is Always Technology: Assessing New Technologies as Environments for Literacy” (TNT: Texts and Technologies. Ed. Janice R. Walker and Ollie O. Ovideo. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003. 205-239.):

Taken together, the work of all three scholars, along with those they have influenced, might be described briefly in what I would call the “OHM Thesis” (indicating the first letters of each name, Ong, Havelock, and McLuhan). That thesis might be stated as follows: “technologies of representation, communication, and mediation, when adopted widely in any cultural setting, and maintained over at least a generation or two of use, begin to alter fundamentally the cultural epistemologies and discursive practices of that culture.”

I’ve been meaning to blog this for a long time as I refer to the OHM thesis from time to time. I don’t think the term’s gained much purchase, but it’s ingrained for me. Vince introduced me to Ong as rhetorician and his wife, Vicki, physically introduced me to Fr. Ong himself.1 I’ve heard the OHM thesis referred to in class, heard it used in discussion, and was asked to write about it in my comprehensive exams. Often, when I use the adjective “Ongian,” I’m really referring to the OHM thesis, which is a better term because it acknowledges the role McLuhan and Havelock play in the idea.

  1. It was at the department picnic a few weeks into my first semester at SLU and she noticed me looking over at a smallish, elderly Jesuit who I strongly suspected to be Ong. “Would you like to meet Fr. Ong?” she asked. I nodded or said yes or something. “You don’t need to be nervous,” she said, “He’s really friendly. I’ll introduce you.” I don’t remember much about that first meeting, except that I told him that I was from Colorado and he told me he’d taught at Regis in Denver and really enjoyed his stays at a Jesuit retreat house in the mountains west of Denver (which may or may not be the Sacred Heart Jesuit Retreat House in Sedalia). Over the years, he didn’t always remember my name (he was about 85 when I first met him), but he would always say “I know you, you’re from Colorado.” [↩]

Defending Electracy: Ulmer on the Need for the Term

30 Wednesday Apr 2008

Posted by in Digital Studies/New Media, Media Ecology, Quotes, Scholarship

≈ Leave a Comment

Wikipedia editors are once again arguing that the electracy entry ought to be merged into the information and media literacy entry. (Which is, I guess, a much better fight to be having than when some Wikipedia editors decided the term should be killed altogether.)  To help make the case, Ulmer posted the following passage to the Invent-L discussion list, which I post here for my own archival purposes:

The upshot of this bottom-up  method is not ‘literacy,’ a knowledge we already ‘know,’ but a set of behaviors Gregory Ulmer calls ‘electracy,’ a knowlege citizens of networked cultures ‘see’ and ‘do.’  Agile operators, willy-nilly, of computer keyboards, ATMs, cell phones, PDAs, Gameboys, iPods, and the other devices of our digital epoch, we are already, in an  unreflective fashion and in various degrees, at ease with digitality.  ‘The nice thing about having such a term,’ Ulmer tells Talan Memmott, ‘is not only the efficiency, but the categorical effect it produces.  For one thing, it helps us see the difference between [electracy] and media literacy ([a term] whose goal is to protect from or defend against electracy by means of forms and practices specific to the previous apparatus; the equivalent for an oral person calling literacy alphabetic orality’). (6)

From: Morris, Adelaide. “New Media Poetics:  As We May Think/How to Write.” New Media Poetics:  Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Eds. Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss. MIT Press, 2006.

Meyrowitz on Medium Theory

18 Wednesday May 2005

Posted by in Media Ecology, Quotes, Walter Ong

≈ Leave a Comment

Yesterday, I gave a long preface to this post, a definition of medium theory from Joshua Meyrowitz’s “Taking McLuhan and ‘Medium Theory’ Seriously: Technological Change and the Evolution of Education” (Technology and the Future of Schooling: Ninety-fifth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. Part II. Ed. Stephen T. Kerr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. 73-110).

Meyrowitz writes:

I prefer using the term ‘medium theory’ to describe it, so that the essence of the argument and the contributions of other theorists become more visible. I use the singular, ‘medium theory,’ rather than ‘media theory,’ to describe this philosophical tradition because what makes it different from most other media theories is its focus on the characteristics of each individual medium or of each particular type of media. Medium theorists are interested in differentiating among media. Broadly speaking, media theorists ask: what are the relatively fixed features of each means of communicating and how do these features make the medium physically, psychologically, and socially different from other media and face-to-face interaction? (79)

Most of the time I’m doing media studies or media ecology or even orality/literacy studies, that’s exactly what I’m interested in doing. It is what I’m trying to figure out in my Notes from the Walter J Ong Archives posts of October 16, 2004 and October 19, 2004 posts, and it’s why Professional Lurker was interested in those posts, which were first emails to TechRhet.

More from Meyrowitz:

Medium theory examines such variables as: which and how many senses are required to attend to the medium; whether the communication is bidirectional or unidirectional [or multidirectional]; how quickly messages can be disseminated; the relative degree of ‘definition,’ ‘resolution,’ or ‘fidelity’ involved; how much training is needed to encode and decode in the medium and how many ‘levels of skill’ are involved; how many people can attend to the same message at the same moment; and so forth. Medium theorists argue that such variables influence the medium’s use and its social, political, and psychological impact.

Medium questions are relevant to both micro-level (individual situations) and macro-level (cultural) changes. On the micro level, medium questions ask how the choice of one medium over another affects a [new page] particular situation or interaction (calling someone on the phone versus writing a letter, for example). On the macro level, medium questions address the ways in which the addition of a new medium to an existing matrix of media may alter social interactions and social structures in general (e.g., how widespread use of the telephone has changed the role of letter writing and influenced the nature of social interactions in general). The most interesting — and most controversial — medium theory deals with the macro level.

The analyses of the medium theorists are often more difficult to test and apply than the results of focused studies of particular media messages, but they are of significance because they suggest that media are not simply channels for conveying information between two or more environments. As McLuhan put it in his often-quoted and usually misunderstood pun, ‘the medium is the message.’ That is, the subtler and more persuasive societal influences derive from the form of the communication, not from the particular messages that are sent through the medium. (79-80)

Later in the article, Meyrowitz echoes Ong by stating that medium theory does not argue that medium or media cause social change in and of themselves, but rather that there is an interaction between the two:

The thrust of medium theory is the argument that we want to understand more fully media’s contribution to social change, we need to draw heavily on such analysis of the forms of communication, instead of relying exclusively on the more traditional concerns with who controls the media institutions and with the imitative or persuasive impact of media messages. Further, medium theory does not necessarily claim that media, even in their combination with other factors, function in a straight, deterministic manner. The thrust of this perspective is that the features of each media environment encourage certain patterns of thought and experience while discouraging others. (87)

cross posted, in part, at Notes from the Walter J Ong Archives

Notes from Harbus: “The Wanderer” as rumination

16 Monday May 2005

Posted by in Medieval/Medievalism, Memory, Mnemonic Practices, Old English, Quotes

≈ Leave a Comment

From Harbus, Antonina. The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry. Costerus New Series 143. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.

Harbus argues that “The Wanderer” is “personal rumination rather than an address to a second person” (133). She argues that “[t]he text as a whole, interpreted in this light, invites the reader to consider the active role of the mental life in the construction of the past, present and future, a complex argument facilitated by verbal repetition and an allusive rather than explicit narrative” (133).

The Wanderer’s remark also places remembered images in a position of importance in relation to emotional stability, and introduces the relevance of Christian ideas which have offset the negative images from the past and destabilized conclusions reached purely cognitively without spiritual input. (142)

Notes from Harbus: The rhetoric of elegy and memory

16 Monday May 2005

Posted by in Medieval/Medievalism, Memory, Old English, Quotes

≈ Leave a Comment

From Harbus, Antonina. The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry. Costerus New Series 143. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.

The semantic character of these texts shows clearly that the rhetoric of elegiac expression is idiomatically grounded i the mind, which is explicitly the site of apprehension, revisitation, and reprocessing of experience through memory. (132)

Notes from Harbus: Wisdom poetry, the development of the self, and memory

16 Monday May 2005

Posted by in Medieval/Medievalism, Old English, Quotes

≈ Leave a Comment

From Harbus, Antonina. The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry. Costerus New Series 143. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.

In Old English wisdom poetry, the mind is primarily the faculty whereby experience is ordered, controlled, and recorded. It is not only a storehouse of useful pieces of information, but also the processing unit which interprets that knowledge and applies it to a spiritual programme of self-reform. The constant references to the active mind as the faculty of wisdom communicates the dicta that wisdom is inadequate without thought and that personal responsibility for self-vigilance is grave. In the close association assumed between mental awareness and salvation, these poems articulate their own status as more than lists or passive collections of data: they are rather stimuli to contemplation, not just of precepts and proverbs, but on the need to invigorate the life of the mind. Both knowledge and thought are required in the development of the self, which is variously the explicit or unstated agenda of this kind of literature. (86)