Category Archives: Rhetoric and Composition

A CCCC Presentation Outtake: Some Thoughts on Silence

11 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by in Conferences, Presentations, Rhetoric and Composition, Silence, Writing

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When I opened my notebook to arrange all my clippings into a coherent talk for CCCC 2013, Lisa asked me to pause so that she could take a picture. She tweeted it with the comment, “this is what an unblocked John Walter looks like.”

Finishing up my presentation for CCCC this Saturday, I’m wading through material that isn’t going to make it into my talk. Taken all together, the session planning emails, research notes, musings, talks with Lisa, and reflections on silence as I freewrote last spring are far more usable and are far more material than I expected. Even a lot of the raw freewriting is asking to be turned into a collage essay—a genre I learned from Peter Elbow’s work and which I regularly assign in writing classes.1

Much of this writing, even the session planning emails, is deeply rooted in the personal, and while the focus of my own part of the session is on the issue of academics with severe writing difficulties and how we as mentors and friends and supervisors can be productively supportive, I will get intensely personal, too. As I’m looking at all this material, especially the freewriting and process writing I did last year as I was struggling to write again, I’m wondering what should and should not be shared. I’m going bold in the presentation, so I might as well not shy away from things here, so here’s an unedited passage from a freewriting session I did on March 24, 2012:

I’ve been spending a good deal of time thinking about silence these days. About becoming silent and being silent. Not silent because I want to be or even silence as protest but a pathological silence. Silence I couldn’t escape from if I wanted to That kind of silence. A silence I couldn’t escape from. I struggled against that silence. I wasn’t able to do what I wanted. I was pushed into a corner. I had to fight. No, not really. I didn’t fight. I let it overtake me. Not that I saw myself has having any options at the time. Emotionally, psychologically, I’m not sure that I did. The silence was a sympton of something much greater, a deep and difficult depression, and I couldn’t address the silence until I had addressed the depression, unitl I got through that. I have gotten through that and now I seem to be writing these days. Writing something. Writing somehow. And that’s good. I like that. I’m writing and it’s good. The silence was a difficult thing to deal with.

Just do it, I’d get told. Or it finally comes down to you and the pen. You and doing the writing. You getting it down. Just write. One page a day. Everyone can write one page a day. Yes, I did that. Or tried to do that. What I produced was horrible, terrible, dark screeds against my self. Dark outpourings of self-loathing and hatred and despair. Painful stuff to look at now, but I have looked at it. I seem to have saved some of it. Some piece of it. And that is good. Not because I like it but because I have it to share in all its raw and terrible and nasty and dark ahd hateful nature. Hopelessness. I have that and I can point to it and I can say that it’s not just about doing it. It’s not just about sitting down and putting pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard. You need to be ready to write. When writing difficulties have become pathological, you need to resolve the underlying issues first. You need to get yourself into the proper state of mind first. Get yourself emotionally healthy again. If you don’t, no amount of freewriting is going to save you. Or, maybe I should say that no amount of freewriting was going to save me. It was but one more venue to bash myself into obilivion. Another weapon to turn upon myself. At times I tried to do the writing without beating myself up but the only thing that would come, the only kind of writing I could sustain in that vein was to attack myself. And it was not good. Not good at all. It wasn’t helpful. That kind of self-loathing would tear me down and remind me that I was once again failing at something so central to who I wanted to be and the life I wanted to live and there’s nothing good about that.

I almost titled my CCCC talk “Freewriting Couldn’t Save Me.” Freewriting couldn’t save me a year after my psychologist had decided I no longer needed treatment for the depression that developed out of my failed marriage, a depression that first manifested itself in an increasing inability to write. I’m reminded here of Lynn Bloom’s two case studies in “Anxious Writers in Context: Gradaute School and Beyond,” published in Mike Rose’s edited collection When a Writer Can’t Write: Studies in Writers’ Block and Other Composing-Process Problems. About Ellen, the graduate student unlikely to finish her degree, Bloom writes, “To resolve Ellen’s writing problems would require a marriage therapist in addition to a writing specialist, to focus on their family context as the source of some of the difficulties (131). As Juliette Ludeker, one of my co-presenters this Saturday, put it in the title of her talk, there are situations “When Being Able to Write Has Nothing to Do with the Ability to Write.”

  1. The more I think about a collage essay representing/exploring the silence of pathological writing difficulties, the more I’m intrigued. It would make an interesting companion to Dasiy Levy’s collage essay “On Silence” in the eighth issue of Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion and Peter Elbow’s own “Silence: A Collage,” first published in Brand and Graves’ Presence of Mind: Writing and the Domain Beyond the Cognitive and reprinted in his Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing. [↩]

The Silence Project, CCCC 2013, Session N.29

08 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by in Academia, Rhetoric and Composition, Scholarship, Silence

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With CCCC next week, I thought I’d edit this post I wrote in July and move it up. It’s a description of the session Juliette Ludeker, Carrie A. Lamanna, Lisa Schamess, and I put together.

The Silence Project: Giving Voice to Academics with Severe Writing Difficulties

In his essay “Illiteracy at Oxford and Harvard: Reflections on the Inability to Write,” Peter Elbow gives an account of the writers’ block that led him to drop out of graduate school. Significant about this essay is not that Elbow’s ongoing struggles with writing eventually left him with the inability to write but that he eventually chose to make his story public.

In Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing, psychologist Robert Boice explains that while severe writing difficulties are not uncommon among academics, they are rarely discussed openly (1). In fact, he notes, he’s found that most academics are more comfortable discussing their sexual dysfunctions than their struggles with writing (1). This double silence, the silence about being silent, leads those struggling with writing to struggle alone, unaware that their struggles are not unique. This silence also means that mentors and colleagues of academic writers struggling with severe writing difficulties are both unaware of and unable to distinguish between more common forms of writers’ block that can be readily addressed by traditional means (breaking the task into smaller components, free writing, relaxation techniques, forcing yourself to write, etc.) and more severe, even pathological, writing difficulties that often require more serious intervention.

The members of this panel wish to help break the silence that surrounds this issue by sharing our own struggles with writing and to use our experiences to offer insights for others. Our varied stories illustrate some of the reasons writers become blocked and illustrate that blocking may have nothing to do with specific writing tasks, anxieties, or work habits. We have three goals for this session. First, we want to help make this issue public so that others who suffer severe writing difficulties may know that they are not alone. Second, we want to make others aware of how common this issue is within academia so that all academics, especially those who mentor graduate students and tenure-track faculty, understand the difference between periodic writing difficulties and severe writing problems that are, in Boyce’s terms, “pathological.” Finally, we wish to draw from our own individual struggles to offer insights and resources for others who are struggling, for those mentoring academic writers, and for teaching.

John Walter [“Becoming Acquainted with the Silent Underground: Academics and Severe Writing Difficulties”] will begin our discussion by introducing the issue of severe, even pathological, writing difficulties among academics and how the impulse toward silence about the issue—or a tendency to elide over the real psychological and emotional damage it can cause—can hinder, even harm, those most in need of help. His own writing struggle, caused by a years-long depression and the ending of his marriage, led him to openly discuss his plight with colleagues, especially other compositionists, which in turn led him to a community and resources to better understand his own situation and that of other academics in similar straits. In turn, these discoveries led to a conviction that this problem deserves more attention within the Academy. Drawing upon both existing scholarship and his own observations, he will discuss his discoveries about the damaging misperceptions that isolate those who struggle and often lead us to approach pathological writing difficulties in the same way as more familiar and remediable “writer’s block.”

Juliette Ludeker [“Waiting for the ‘Luxury of Fearlessness’: When Being Able to Write Has Nothing to Do with the Ability to Write”] will explore the social and psychological factors that can complicate the ability of advanced writers to carry out their projects, by examining her own struggle to complete a dissertation, the topic of which (the rhetoric of adoption) has been difficult to separate from her own life experiences as an adoptee. She draws upon Audre Lorde’s “Transformation of Silence,” specifically Lorde’s claim that “[w]e have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for the final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.” While recognizing and valuing that far too often it is women, people of color, marginalized groups—the Other(s)—who are silenced and displaced within the Academy, both by imposition and by fear, Speaker 2 seeks to extend Lorde’s insights to apply to additional questions (outside of being Other) of what threatens the efforts of advanced writers to write and what keeps them waiting for the “luxury of fearlessness.”

Carrie A. Lamanna [“Why I Quit School: A Performative Exploration of the Relationship Between Writing and Power”] will use Norman Denzin’s theory of life stories and Laurel Richardson’s autoethnographic methodology to create a multimedia one-woman stage performance in which she tells stories of her struggles and triumphs with writing, beginning with the first grade and ending with her current status as an assistant professor trying to write enough publishable work to get tenure. Together, she and the audience, discover that writing is at once a form of power and subject to power. Her stories ask the audience to consider how the power structures of school—from grade school to graduate school—work to deny students of authority and agency. This presentation questions the institutional infrastructure that surrounds academic writing, especially disciplinary genres and conventions and evaluation and grading.

Lisa Schamess [“Standing the ‘Almost Impossible’: Uses of Silence and Failure in Writing and Teaching”] will identify the possibilities and limitations of viewing silences, frustrations, flawed drafts, and incompleteness as writing instead of as failures. She will share the writing and teaching strategies she adopted during a decade in which unexpected widowhood and the demands of single parenthood blocked her writing (as Tillie Olsen famously articulated, “[n]ot because the capacities to create no longer exist, or the need …but because the circumstances for sustained creation have been almost impossible”). She will describe how she now incorporates her own shortcomings and struggles into authentic communication with students about their blocks and silences, removing the stigma from silence and recognizing it as valuable ground upon which writing is enacted with care and respect for the unsaid and unsayable. Finally, she will share how she has built contemplative and restorative silences into her own writing practice and her classroom techniques, the importance of non-verbal approaches such as doodling and drawing in journals, and the need to continually revisit and value silences and spaces within the writing.

“The Unsucessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block'”

03 Thursday May 2012

Posted by in Academia, Cognitive Studies, Rhetoric and Composition, Silence

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A couple of days ago, I wrote about my recent struggles with writing. As I indicated at the end of that post, I’ve decided to turn this experience into an occassion for scholarship, something we’ve started calling “the silence project.” To start with, I’ve found a few others wiling to talk about their experiences with severe writing difficulties and I’m organizing a panel for next year’s Conference on College Composition and Communication. Some where along the line, I need to see if I can work into my work this 1974 article, published in The Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis: “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’” (.pdf). It’s short and well worth the few minutes it’ll take you to read it.1

I’d like to thank Tim Laquintano (@tim_laq) who tweeted the link.

  1. It’s a good thing that I can now laugh at all this, yes? [↩]

Relearning to Write: Of Great Struggles and Small Victories

01 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by in Life, Rhetoric and Composition, Silence, Writing

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Screen shot of 750words.com showing I'd completed the April Challenge. I’ve written about, or at least mentioned, my using 750words.com a couple of times, first briefly at the end of a post in February when I’d only used it a few times, and then in late March as part of my documenting my participation in A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities. I started using 750words because, as I mentioned back in January, I’d been quiet for far too long. In fact, while it didn’t always look like it online, I’d largely become silent in far too many ways and had been so for four or five years. Simply put, I’d become unable to engage in most forms of formal writing, especially professional writing, which, for an academic, is disastrous.

Long story short, in the build up to the ending of my marriage—an 18-year relationship—I became deeply depressed and that depression manifested itself in an inability to write, a problem which eventually took on a life of its own and became a second loci for depression. The writing issues really took hold in 2005, the worst of my depression was during 2007-2009, and a couple of friends intervened in late 2008. For a while, I tried addressing both issues simultaneously, but eventually realized I wasn’t going to get anywhere unless I let go of the struggle to write and focused my attention on my original issue. By March 2010 I’d regained enough of a sense of self to start reclaiming my life, and that summer I started struggling with writing again, which usually resulted in depression jags that could last from a few days to a few weeks. By the end of 2010, I decided I needed to stop fighting myself, which meant, among other things, giving up my job at Creighton. (A decision which made it much easier to say yes to a radical life change a few months later.) If I started writing again, it was going to be because I wanted to write rather than because I was required to.

And that brings me back to 750words.com. In August, for the first time since I started kindergarten, a new academic year started without me. I want back in. So I tried writing again. I’m not sure I can really convey the struggle I had. Trying to write could still induce panic attacks and depression jags. In working towards writing again I reread and read more deeply Peter Elbow’s work and took much inspiration from his own account of dropping out of graduate school because he’d lost the ability to write,1 and I took much inspiration from Lisa‘s own struggles with silence after she was widowed in 2000. In October, I failed in my attempt to write a conference proposal about how I’d been teaching Marshall McLuhan over the past four years. The panic attack was so overwhelming I couldn’t even dictate enough of my ideas for Lisa to cobble together a draft for me.

Finally, at the end of December something broke. It might be more accurate to describe it as a breakthrough, but it never felt like that. It felt like something broke, and I found that an episode of Elbowian free writing wouldn’t result in a session of self-loathing. It took me a few months to trust myself, to believe that I could sit down to write and not fall apart, but I found that I could. Finally, one day in late February, I wrote nearly 3,000 words in one sitting (some of which was the post “Memory Work: Making Another’s Past Your Own“), and in March I wrote a CCCC presentation with little difficulty even though it was under serious time constraints—my presentation was  to be a response to the rest of the panel. I’m sure the CCCC presentation went so smoothly because I’d been using 750words.com, not yet daily, but 4-5 times a week.

When the end of March came, I was using 750words.com daily, so I decided to bite the bullet and take up the April Challenge—write at least 750 words/day for the entire month of April. Yesterday, the last day of April, I wrote for the thirty-eighth day in a row, meaning I completed the challenge. (The image at the top of this post is a screen shot from yesterday’s report.) Considering that less than six months ago my attempts at freewriting could induce a depression spiral, this is a real victory.

I’ve been wanting to write about my struggle with writing for months now but I’ve been afraid to. Writing is what academics do, and as a specialist in rhetoric and composition, I teach writing. One thing I’ve learned, however, both from reading up on the issue and from talking with others, is that serious writing difficulties are far more common among academics than we all let on. And by serious writing difficulties, I’m not talking about your typical writers’ block or procrastination that afflicts most of us from time to time. I’m talking about writing difficulties that pyschologist Robert Boice classify as “pathological.”

In the introduction to his book Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing,2 Boice explains that under pathological writing difficulties, “[w]riting projects acquire aversive, even phobic, qualities while writers grow distressed, even depressed” (1). This problem, he argues, is made worse by the fact that pathological writing difficulties are rarely discussed publicly, keeping those who are struggling from realizing how common the issue is within academia. In fact, he notes, that in his more than two decades of treating academics with serious writing difficulties, he has found that most people are more comfortable talking about sexual dysfunction than their struggles with writing.

I want to work towards changing this, and based on a number of graduate students and tenure-track faculty who have come out to me as I’ve selectively whispered my own story to them, I know that we desperately need to talk more openly about serious writing difficulties and we need to become better educated about them as well. This is of vital importance for those who supervise and mentor graduate students and pre-tenure faculty. I have much more to say about this issue and will do so, both here and in other venues.

  1. He gives an account of this struggle in “Illiteracy at Oxford and Harvard: Reflections on the Inability to Write,” first published in Reflective Stories: Becoming Teachers of College English and English Education (1998) and reprinted in Everyone Can Write: Essays Towards a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing (2000).  [↩]
  2. Boice has written extensively on writers’ block and overcoming writing difficulties. In addition to finding a number of his articles useful for understanding my situtation—for instance, I learned I suffered from five of the six most common causes of blocking—I’m finding both Professors as Writers and How Writers Journey from Comfort and Fluency to be helpful for a long-term strategy for keeping me writing. [↩]

CCCC Presentation: Secondary Orality and Digital Mobocracy: A Response

23 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by in Media Ecology, Presentations, Rhetoric and Composition, Walter Ong

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For CCCC this year, I was asked to serve as a respondent for the session Secondary Orality and Digital Mobocracy (D.25, Thursday, March 22, 3:15-4:30 pm)

As respondent, my role was to “provide brief a perspective on the work of Walter Ong especially as Ong’s work pertains to the issues covered by the above speakers. The respondent will also address the above speakers’ different interpretations of Ong’s work and connect their interpretations to the larger concern of Ong’s continued relevance to composition and rhetoric studies.” Presented here is a longer version of my prepared comments. It ends abruptly so that I could end the talk by addressing the individual papers and their relationship to Ong’s work.

Session Title: Secondary Orality and Digital Mobocracy

RESPONSE

Introduction: Quote and Anecdote

I want to begin with both a quote and an anecdote. First, the quote from Fr. Ong’s 1970 article “Comment: Voice, Print, and Culture”:

Speech is essentially a spoken and heard phenomenon, a matter of voice and ear, an event in the world of sound. Words are sounds. Written words are substitutes for sound and are only marks on a surface until they are converted to sound again, either in the imagination or by actual vocalization.

We know this, but we find it almost impossible to grasp its full implications. The spoken word has become entangled with writing and print. When we talk about words, we are seldom sure whether we mean spoken words or written words or printed words or all of these simultaneously. (87)

And now the anecdote: During the first year I was in the Ph.D. program at Saint Louis University, one of our professors, Dr. Casaregola, had taken me and another graduate student to talk with Fr. Ong. At the time I was trying to work out the problem of what to call the oral-like characteristics of written online communication. I knew that some people were applying the term secondary orality to the phenomena and that others had started using the term tertiary orality. The problem with either term, my fellow graduate student had pointed out to me, was that written online communication isn’t oral; it’s written. I raised the issue with Fr. Ong and asked if maybe secondary literacy might be a better term. Before he had a chance to respond, I added, “I just don’t know what to make of all this.” He said something about having put some thought to the issue and then replied, “I don’t know what to make of it either.”

And that, I think, is a central question raised by these presentations today: What do we make of all this? When we talk about words, are we talking about spoken words, written words, printed words, or all of them simultaneously? On the surface this question may seem simple. After all, oral communication is auditory and written and printed communication is visual. But, if it were that simple, why was I struggling with these questions. And why were so many others? And why, in fact, did Fr. Ong himself reply, “I don’t know what to make of it either”?

Peter Elbow, in the beginning of first chapter of his newest book, Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing, discusses specifically the difficulties in disentangling speech from writing and then spends the chapter trying to do so. In summarizing, he notes that while the differences between speech and writing are clear when we consider them as physical processes, as physical media, and as sensory modalities, the distinction is not so clear when we think about them as language or as products (19). The distinction between speech and writing as language and speech and writing as products become slippery, he notes, “because it depends so much upon social and cultural forces rather than the physical realm” (19). And that’s a key issue to remember here: when we talk about issues of orality and literacy, we are sometimes talking about physical processes, sometimes talking about physical media, sometimes talking about sensory modalities, sometimes talking about language, sometimes talking about products, and sometimes talking about many or all of them simultaneously. As Peter Elbow explains, “much of the confusion about speaking and writing [or, I would add, orality and literacy] comes from not noticing how these words operate in multiple realms or dimensions” (13). When working with these terms, we need to be precise, both for ourselves and for others.

With that said, I want to make a few comments to help us better understand Fr. Ong’s work in orality-literacy contrasts, better understand how that work has been and continues to be relevant to the study composition and rhetoric, and how better to understand the presentations in this session.

Definition of Orality-Literacy Contrasts

First, it might be of use to define what we mean when we talk about orality and literacy within the context of Fr. Ong’s work. In a 1996 interview in Composition Forum, Fr. Ong defines orality-literacy contrasts as “the understanding of the relationships between verbal as well as other types of human expression and the total evolution of the cosmos that we human beings are part of and are still learning more and more about daily” (Kleine and Gale, 83). Fr. Ong described what he did as associative, as trying to describe how various elements of human communication interrelate with consciousness, with culture, with technology, and with the cosmos at large. Understood in this light, the boundaries between the study orality-literacy contrasts and the study of composition and rhetoric are difficult to discern.

Aural/Visual Roots

Scattered throughout the correspondence in the Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection are accounts of what Fr. Ong calls his central discovery, an account of which can be found in Nielson’s “A Bridge Builder: Walter J. Ong at 80.” About this discovery, Ong explains,:

It happened while I was doing my dissertation research in France […]. I was reading Rudoph Bultmann, the Protestant theologian, who made reference to the idea that knowing, for the Hebrews, had to do with hearing and sound, while the Greeks thought of knowing as related to seeing. I guess it took me about a day, but suddenly I could see how the whole thing fit together (404).

Issues of orality and literacy aren’t just issues about spoken and written words but of how we organize and perceive the world in terms of acoustic and visual space. Both rhetoric and poetics, Ong explains in his unfinished manuscript Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization, has its origins in the Greek word mythos and the Indo-European root meduh, which “signifies to reflect, think over, consider – activities interior to the human being” (1-2). Logic and dialectic, on the other hand, he explains, have their origins in the Greek logos, which has connotations of “computation, reckoning, account of money handled, hence treatment of cognitive matters in terms of discrete units—which are the basis of digitization” and the Indo-European root leg-, which is based upon “a spatialized, exteriorized visual and/or tactile metaphor” (2).

For a more detailed discussion of Ong’s exploration of the sensorium and the aural/oral-visual roots in Ong’s exploration of orality and literacy, see The Presence of the Word, “‘I See What You Say’: Sense Analogues for Intellect,” and, to a lesser extent, Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue.

What Breaking Ong’s Work Down to Orality->Literacy->Secondary Orality Misses

Another point I would like to make is that all too often when we discuss the oral-to-visual shift Ong describes in his work, we simplify it to just three stages: orality, literacy, and secondary orality. What this oversimplification leaves out is Ong’s concepts of primary orality (and its distinction from oralism), textuality, residual orality, digitization, secondary literacy and secondary visualism. Furthermore, this oversimplification gives the impression of a simple linear progression of technological development which Ong never intended, a point he makes explicit in the “Complications and Overlappings” section of chapter 2 of The Presence of the Word. In other words, Ong gave us a number of terms and concepts that far too few of us make use of.

Provisional nature

While Ong gave us these terms, he never intended for his work to be the final say. As a Jesuit priest, he believed that as time progresses God reveals to us more and more of Creation. Ong believed that his role, as both a priest and a scholar, was to describe God’s Creation as we currently understood it. I can’t stress this point enough as it means that Ong believed his work to always be provisional and always subject to revision as we learn more and more about the universe. He discusses this issue most fully in the essays “Knowledge in Time” and “Secular Knowledge and Revealed Religion,” and he makes explicit the provisional nature of his ideas in Orality & Literacy in the chapter “Some Psychodynamics of Orality.”

Before he lists the ten characteristics of orally based thought, he explains:

This inventory of characteristics is not presented as exclusive or conclusive but as suggestive, for much more work and reflection is needed to deepen understanding of orally based thought (and thereby understanding chiographically based thought, typographically based thought, and electronically based thought). (36)

This crucial qualification is almost always left out of discussions of this chapter, most notably in Beth Daniell’s “Against the Great Leap Theory of Literacy.” When working with Ong’s terminology and concepts, we need to regard Ong’s work as a framework to extend, to develop, to push forward, and to push against.

Secondary Orality, Secondary Literacy, and Secondary Visualism

While Fr. Ong told me he wasn’t sure what to make of all this, the fact of the matter is that he had put much thought into it, and he had presented his ideas, both in an interview with Kleine and Gale, published in Composition Forum in 1996, and in some public lectures. To wrap up my comments, I want to end with a brief discussion of how Ong defined secondary orality, secondary literacy, and secondary visualism.

About secondary orality, he explains to Kleine and Gale that he began using the term, he meant the orality associated with radio and television, and he called it “secondary orality” because of its heavy reliance upon literacy and technologies enabled by literacy:

When I first used the term ‘secondary orality,’ I was thinking of the kind of orality you get on radio and television, where oral performance produces effects somewhat like those of ‘primary orality,’ the orality using the unprocessed human voice, particularly in addressing groups, but where the creation of orality is of a new sort. Orality here is produced by technology. Radio and television are ‘secondary’ in the sense that they are technologically powered, demanding the use of writing and other technologies in designing and manufacturing the machines which reproduce voice. They are thus unlike primary orality, which uses no tools or technology at all. Radio and television provide technologized orality. This is what I originally referred to by the term ‘secondary orality.’ (Kleine and Gale 80)

In the interview, Ong addresses the problem of oral-like characteristics in online written discourse by simultaneously acknowledging its oral-like features while at the same time establishing written discourse as something visual rather than aural-oral. He, in fact, coins the term “secondary literacy” which I brought up with him some years later:

I have also heard the term ‘secondary orality’ lately applied by some to other sorts of electronic verbalization which are really not oral at all—to the Internet and similar computerized creations for text. There is a reason for this usage of the term. In nontechnologized oral interchange, as we have noted earlier, there is no perceptible interval between the utterance of the speaker and the hearer’s reception of what is uttered. Oral communication is all immediate, in the present. Writing, chirographic or typed, on the other hand, comes out of the past. Even if you write a memo to yourself, when you refer to it, it’s a memo which you wrote a few minutes ago, or maybe two weeks ago. But on a computer network, the recipient can receive what is communicated with no such interval. Although it is not exactly the same as oral communication, the network message from one person to another or others is very rapid and can in effect be in the present. Computerized communication can thus suggest the immediate experience of direct sound. I believe that is why computerized verbalization has been assimilated to secondary ‘orality,’ even when it comes not in oral-aural format but through the eye, and thus is not directly oral at all. Here textualized verbal exchange registers psychologically as having the temporal immediacy of oral exchange. To handle such technologizing of the textualized word, I have tried occasionally to introduce the term ‘secondary literacy.’ We are not considering here the production of sounded words on the computer, which of course are even more readily assimilated to ‘secondary orality.’ (Kleine and Gale 80-81)

While Ong mentions secondary literacy in the Composition Forum interview, his brief treatment of secondary visualism exists only in unpublished lectures found in the Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. The most detailed discussion is from a lecture given to students in Saint Louis University’s Aquinas Institute of Theology on 6 October 1995. About secondary visualism, Fr. Ong says: “Secondary orality is now accompanied by secondary visualism: computerized texts, graphics, etc. Ultimately, ‘virtual reality’” (“Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism” 3).

Works Cited

Daniell, Beth. “Against the Great Leap Theory of Literacy.” PRE/TEXT 7 (Fall-Winter 1986): 181-93.

Elbow, Peter. Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012.

Kleine, Michael and Frederic Gale. “The Elusive Presence of the Word: An Interview with Walter Ong.” Composition Forum 7.2 (1996): 65-86.

Nielson, Mark. “A Bridge Builder: Walter J. Ong at 80.” America 167.16 (Nov. 21, 1992): 404-406.

Ong, Walter J. “Before Textuality: Orality and Interpretation.” Oral Tradition 3.3 (1988): 259-69; Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 3: Further Essays, 1952-1990. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995. 215-25.

—. “Comment: Voice, Print, and Culture.” The Journal of Typographic Research 4.1 (1970): 77-83.

—. “Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today’s Computers.” Communication Research Trends 18.2 (1998): 4-21. Rpt. in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 527-49.

—. “Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the ‘I.’” Oral Tradition 10.1 (1995): 3-36. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 183-203.

—. “‘I See What You Say’: Sense Analogues for Intellect.” Human Inquiries: Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 10.1-3 (1970): 22-42. Rpt. in Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. 122-44. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 3: Further Essays, 1952-1990. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995. 91-111.

—. “Knowledge in Time.” Introduction to Knowledge and the Future of Man: An International Symposium. Ed. Walter J. Ong. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968. 3-38. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 1. Selected Essays and Studies, 1952-1991. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Intro. Farrell. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. 127-53.

—. Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization. Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

—. “Oralism to Online Thinking.” Explorations in Media Ecology 2.1 (2003): 43-4.

—. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

—. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena of Religious History. The Terry Lectures. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967.

—. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958.

—. “Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism.” Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

—. “Secular Knowledge, Revealed Religion, and History.” Religious Education 52.5 (1957): 341-49; Rpt as “Secular Knowledge and Revealed Religion” in American Catholic Crossroads: Religious-Secular Encounters in the Modern World. New York: The Macmillian Company, 1959. 74-95.

—. “Text as Interpretation: Mark and After.” Oral Tradition in Literature: Interpretation in Context. Ed. John Miles Foley. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1986. 147-69. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 2. Supplementary Studies. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. 191-210.

Some thoughts on what we often mean when we talk about technological literacy

16 Friday Jul 2010

Posted by in Digital Studies/New Media, Media Ecology, Rhetoric and Composition, Teaching

≈ 1 Comment

Today’s Inside Higher Ed‘s article “Technologically Illiterate Students” begins:

Say you are an employer evaluating college students for a job. Perusing one candidate’s Facebook profile, you notice the student belongs to a group called “I Pee My Pants When I’m Drunk.” What is your first thought?

It should not be that this student is unemployable for being an intemperate drinker, said Susan Zvacek, director of instructional development at the University of Kansas — though that it might mean that, too. Mainly, though, it should suggest something else — something that might be more relevant to the student’s qualifications.

“What it tells me,” Zvacek said, “is that the student is technologically illiterate.”

The piece then goes on to offer  Zvacek’s definition of technological literacy:

“The digital divide used to be about the hardware haves and have-nots,” she said. “What we’re seeing now is that it’s less about who has hardware, but who has access to information; who has those problem-solving skills. And that’s going to be the digital divide that we’re going to see in the future … the ability to deal with information.”

The assumption that today’s student are computer-literate because they are “digital natives” is a pernicious one, Zvacek said. “Our students are task-specific tech savvy: they know how to do many things,” she said. “What we need is for them to be tech-skeptical.”

On the one hand, I want to stand back and suggest that the issue raised in the anecdote isn’t about technological awareness but rhetorical awareness, about the construction of the self. And it is. At the same time, however, Zvacek is getting at something else. Zvacek is responding to the US Department of Education’s definition of technological literacy as knowing how to use a computer, and in doing so, she’s not alone.1

I want to push this issue farther though, push it beyond the concepts of computer literacy or technological literacy. In fact, I want to push us beyond the use of the word literacy itself for a whole host of reasons, first and foremost because literacy is, technically, about letters, about the written word, and that positions the issue squarely in a particular techno-cultural-noetic milieu.2

I was fumbling with this very subject when I wrote about technological literacy in The Making of a Technorhetorician: A Technological Literacy Collage, which I wrote earlier this year as an example for students working on their own technological literacy collages. I’m unhappy with what I wrote there, unhappy, in fact, as I was writing it. The problem, I’ve realized, is that I fell into the trap I try to push students away from. I let the imperiousness of literacy muddle my thinking3 The issue, I so fumblingly hinted at in my technological literacy collage is not literacy of any sort but awareness rooted in orality-literacy studies and media ecology. Its the kind of awareness that Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong spent their careers trying to teach us.

As long as we keep rooting this issue in particular techno-cultural-noetic contexts, we’re going to keep fumbling along, never to get it right. The awareness I’m talking about here, and the awareness I think Susan Zvacek is getting at without realizing it, is rooted in an awareness of McLuhan’s dictum/maxim “The medium is the massage,” that “[a]ll media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical.”4 That is,  McLuhan’s awareness of how media work as environments:

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a working knowledge of the way media work as environments. (26)

It can be hard, at first, to convince students that you’re actually talking about something relevant to their lives when you jump around from such topics as the difference between alphabets, syllabaries, and logograms; renaissance perspectivism and railroads; Homeric myth and encyclopedias; Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Absurdest theater, and the Fluxus Movement; John Cage and Charlotte Moorman, the TV-bra wearing cellist and performance artist. As McLuhan knew, you’ve got to pull the rug out from under their (our) feet before we can get beneath the surface and understand the deep structures. As I’ve pointed out here and elsewhere from time to time, focusing on surface, making the mistake of being too rooted in a particular techno-cultural-noetic perspective, leads us to focus on the wrong things. My go-to example here is the belief that oral poets must be illiterate. Early scholars of oral tradition too quickly jumped to this conclusion that oral poets must be illiterate because the oral poets they studied were illiterate, even while there was evidence to the contrary, and it mistaken notion was perpetuated for far too long.5 As Ong argued, writing is imperious. It clouds our perspective. We are so rooted in literacy and in print culture that we far too often fail to realize it’s not our natural noetic state or that it’s not inherently better than other noetic states. This is the reason why we use literacy as the metaphor for everything, and in doing so, we fail to recognize that when we think we’re talking about literacy we are sometimes actually talking about awareness of media as environments.

Ultimately, this is why I keep teaching The Medium is the Massage, why I keep returning to it semester after semester even as I resist becoming one of those teachers who always teaches the same thing semester after semester. A year ago, a student told me our university president walked by, saw the student reading The Medium is the Massage, and said, “People still teach that?” Fortunately, this particular student had gotten McLuhan’s message by that time and she was grooving on it big time. She had come to understand McLuhan’s message and its relevance to her 21st-century life. I keep teaching McLuhan because it is relevant to all our 21st-century lives and it will be relevant to the lives of our 30th-century ancestors.

Hmmm…Timothy Leary came up with the dictum “turn on, tune in, drop out” at McLuhan’s urging. (( In Fashbacks, Leary laments that people misinterpreted this as meaning “Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity” rather than asking them to alter their consciousness so to live better.) In that spirit, let me offer a new dictum, one to keep in mind when we think we’re talking about literacy: Peal back, delve deep, be aware.

  1. For those of you unfamiliar with the subject, let me suggest Cindy Selfe’s Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention; Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher’s Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives from the United States, and Stewart Selber’s Multiliteracies for a Digital Age as three good starting points. [↩]
  2. See, for instance, Anne Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s “Blinded By the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy for a Metaphor for Everything Else?” in Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. [↩]
  3. If you’re really curious as to what I mean by this, see Walter J. Ong’s “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” (The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. Ed. Gerd Baumann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. 23-50; Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 143-168.). [↩]
  4. The Medium is the Massage, 26. [↩]
  5. Scholars of oral tradition, including such people as Albert Lord who was one of scholars who first promoted the error, have also worked to correct this perception. For a good, introductory text on this subject, see John Miles Foley’s How to Read an Oral Poem. [↩]