CRDM 701

Week 4 - Nick

"The preservation of the old, in brief, was a prerequisite for the tradition of the new." (Eisenstein, p. 86)

After reading through Ong and moving on to Eisentstein, I found that this quote represented an idea that had been popping up quite frequently.  Namely, that is the ephemeral nature of early communications.  Both authors are quick to point out just how transient the oral word was, and how important it was to come up with mneumonic devices to remember what was important.  Ong points out how lists were not thought of in the way we think of them now, but instead were put in a very repetitive, almost narrative form.  (Joe begat Bob, Bob begat Johnny, Johnny begat too many to fit in this pattern curse him...etc)  Yet as Eisenstein points out, even writing was far more ephemeral than print.  Print achieved permenance only because of quantity.  If there were a hundred thousand copies of your paper/book/treatise/recipe for the best meatloaf EVER, then it was far less likely that your work would be lost to the ages.  Alexandria taught us that lesson by, you know, burning.  I don't know about you, but I've always really wanted to know what else Aristotle had to say.  I have this sneaking suspicion that we'd be in a much different place if we knew.   So much of Western academia owes him a lot, which brings us back around to my opening quote.  What wasn't preserved due to the limitations of writing is now lost for all time.

I also find it interesting how writing began and continued for a long time with a very literal ear for the oral style.  Authors wrote to an audience as though they were literally speaking to them.  Ong points out that 19th century novelists even began with 'Dear Reader'.  This is much like a letter.  Actually, I took a forms of fiction class where I learned that many early books were not novels proper because they were written in the form of letters back and forth.  I think Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is recognized as the first real NOVEL (hence why it is mentioned in this weeks readings several times), but even it has a few chapters that are letters.  (If any lit people want to correct me on this, feel free...my memory could be spotty as that was my Junior year of undergrad.  Maybe it was the first of it's form but not really the first novel proper)  Well...think about it.  Letters sound as though they were made to be read aloud, even to this day.  I'm sure you can find proof in your email for this.  It only makes sense that the first attempts at fictional books in their own form would start out trying to emulate that form, or that of the diary which is also very similar.  Austen on the other hand went the route of the narrated play, if I remember my professor's lecture properly.  You had dialogue and description.  Wala.  Novel concept, that. (oh ho ho...)

That second paragraph was a lot of freestyling on my part.  It is primarily food for thought.  If you find terrible exception with it, feel free to correct me!  I'd love to know what you think, especially if you are more well versed in the history of literature than I.

Posted at 12:58AM Sep 12, 2007 by nmtemple in Week 4  |  Comments[0]

Week 4 - Christin

There?s so much I want to discuss from this week?s readings that I really don?t know where to start, so what I think I?ll do this week is to kind of bring up several smaller topics as opposed to one larger over-arching one?

Ong states that, ?Even with the alphabet, extra-textual context is sometimes needed, but only in exceptional cases ? how exceptional will depend on how well the alphabet has been tailored to a given language.? (84)  This concept is fascinating to me ? there has been some discussion in these readings and others I?ve read that the alphabet, writing, and reading more so limits our ability to express ourselves than through other forms of communication ? we?re limited to the words we have available to us.  This idea, then, that a culture could determine its own alphabet would then mean that same culture in essence is limiting its own capabilities for self expression.  Or am I just reading way too much into this?  Would it mean that certain cultures, like those richer, larger, or more developed ones would produce a ?better? alphabet?

Ong discusses somewhat the effects that writing allows more ideas to be shared among individuals and communities over great distances.  According to Eisenstein, ??access to a greater abundance or variety of written records affected ways of learning, thinking, and perceiving among literate elites? laws, languages, or mental constructs were affected by more uniform texts.? (5)  I have to the side of the paragraph in which this appears written ?INTERNET!? (indeed written in all capital letters)  If printing, although in no means a simple act but still greatly limited by distance regardless of the fact that it can produce multiple identical versions of the same work, produced such a great change in these aspects of individual capabilities and societal structures, what will the Internet do?  I would argue that the Internet achieves ?greater abundance? and a significantly higher ?variety of written records? than print by far, so does this mean our very capabilities in terms of thought is or are changing?  I think it will and already has, as we?ve been discussing already in class.

Insofar as my paper is concerned, Ong on pages 134-135 discusses the election process in a democratic society.  He says pre-radio and television debates emulated old-style orality.  ?Primary orality made itself felt in the additive, redundant, carefully balanced, highly agnostic style, and the intense interplay between speaker and audience.?  With the advent of new technologies, the audience becomes ?absent, invisible, inaudible? (134-135).  My paper will be examining the Democratic party?s use of YouTube in the presidential debates for the 2008 elections, and so I cannot help but wonder whether use of such newer technologies like YouTube is creating a type of orality in between primary and secondary orality wherein the audience is present but absent simultaneously; where the speaker must acknowledge such a presence and once again interact with their audience.

Finally, I couldn?t help but notice something as I was reading this week and I?m not sure I completely agree or like it.  Ong says on page 114 that ?In the process, as rhetoric and Latin went out, women entered more and more into academia, which also became more and more commercially oriented.?  Is he blaming the removal of Rhetoric from academia on the appearance of women or their newfound ability to read and write?

Posted at 10:16PM Sep 11, 2007 by caphelps in Week 4  |  Comments[0]

dawn--week 4 blog

I would like to begin by thanking Eisenstein (1983) for the last point from her selections we read for this week's class.  She writes, "[A]lthough I believe that scribal culture did come to an end, I am not persuaded that one can say the same about print culture" (p. 106).  I've been feeling a little text-centric this week, and I found comfort in those words.

One of the things I keep returning to when reading about the move from oral to scribal to print culture is audience.  The thing that I keep coming back to these days is the role of the audience in digital media. Ong discusses the fictionalized audience that is always located inside narrative texts that "role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves" (101).  He goes on to catalog the evolution of this role through scribal and print culture.  Plato's Socrates engaged in dialogue, Chaucer's tale tellers "spoke" to their fellow travelers, Jane Austen addressed the "dear reader."  Though those differences represent a transition from speaking to writing to printing, the self-conscious positioning of the reader in the narrative still ties the story to orality.  Ong points to Joyce's Finnegan's Wake as a print novel, noting that, although Joyce's prose "reads well aloud," "the voice and its hearer do not fit into any imaginable real-life setting" and that setting is, in fact, "imaginable only because of the writing and print that has gone before it" (103).  Still there is a reader, "a special fictional sort" of reader, in the text for the audience to identify with.  In Orality and Literacy, Ong doesn't explain how this functions, but in "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction" (1975), he offers the example Hemingway's use of definite article in A Farewell to Arms to illustrate this point.

This fictionalized audience is distinctly different from the physical audiences addressed by orators, and Eisenstein (1983) discusses the "displacement of the pulpit" (94) as a source of news and information dissemination and the emergence of a reading public.  Printing is both blamed for "the weakening of communal ties" and credited for enhancing "vicarious participation in distant events" (94).  I don't have any answers for how all of this fits together because everytime I ask myself one, it leads to three new questions.  That's a good thing, I suppose, the somewhat frustrating and thoroughly exhausting.

Posted at 10:14PM Sep 11, 2007 by drshephe in Week 4  |  Comments[0]

Jon - Week 4

 The Ong and Eisenstein texts helped me to think about literacy as a "solitary" act and the impact of the printing press. First, the "environment" of writing is one that establishes a close connection between a writer and his / her text. Ong provides an indication of the similarities between writer and document: "Texts assimilate utterances to the human body. They introduce a feeling for 'headings'. . . chapter derives from the meaning head. . . Pages have not only heads buts also feet" (100). In this fashion, composition, which is typically attributed to the mind, finds itself in a "physical" environment to which the writer can relate.

Ong describes how the solitary writer may find these "physical" attributes of the written page as his / her only companion: "The writer's audience is always a fiction. The writer must set up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves" (102). Writing, clearly, differs from oratory in this facet because speeches are, typically, presented to an audience. A writer is given the difficult task of not only composing the words but also the intended audience. What if, due to some odd circumstance, the audience was not fictionalized and it was present? Although the answer to this question varies, most audience observed situations create an atmosphere where writing becomes exceedingly difficult. (I'm drawing from my writing center experience here -- the presence of a physical audience tended to stifle the composing process, but this does not seem to be particularly true for editing or revision)

How did the invention of the printing press impact the solitary writer? The writer, although still, perhaps, composing alone, was joined by a team of editors and publishers. Capitalism flourished with the introduction of the printing press. Meanwhile, an interesting shift took place. The solitary writer was joined by solitary readers. Ong describes this phenomenon: "[The printing press] produced books smaller and more portable than those common in manuscript culture, setting the stage psychologically for solo reading in a quiet corner, and eventually for completely silent reading" (130-131). Thus, interestingly, the voice of the author, joined by the noise of the printing press, was transmitted at a rate incredible to that prior to the press, yet the resulting noise, that of readers, had begun to change from a "social activity," as it was in manuscript culture, to silence.

Eisenstein also tracks this change. She extends the impact of the mass production of printed materials to community operations between individuals and as a whole: "The notion that society may be regarded as a bundle of discrete units or that the individual is prior to the social group seems to be more compatible with a reading public than a hearing one" (94). This view of communication seems to be more of a change in focus than an outright, radical transformation. Indeed, what once was announced at community gatherings is now read in newspapers; but, at the same time, other types of communication between individuals increased, such as the rise of gatherings at "bookshops, coffee houses, [and] reading rooms" (94). Naturally, the communication change that resulted from the printing press can be applied to modern communication technologies. How does the internet and its many message boards, chat rooms, and e-mail options impact communication between individuals and the society as a whole? Are we becoming more and more solitary? Or are we once again changing the focus of our primary means of communication, thus silencing some aspects of communication and emphasizing others?

Turning to my project, I am studying Google Earth (GE) and its use for humanitarianism. The spatial environment that GE creates presents the individual user with a globe, an outlet to many different people and places. From the perspective of the user sitting at his / her computer spinning the globe around, the interface provides an enormous extension of self that could be compared to the mass production of the printing press. The printing press is a technology that allows a single individual to impact many. Similarly, through various humanitarian projects currently taking place through GE, such as the Crisis in Darfur and the Central African Republic outreach, GE also permits a single individual to take action and impact others.

Posted at 09:22PM Sep 11, 2007 by jtburr in Week 4  |  Comments[1]

Week 4 - Kathy

This week?s readings had me thinking about how print (rather than writing) has shaped Internet technology ? a concept which I honestly never thought much about.

Eisenstien (1983) notes that the duplicative power of print (though paper was less durable than parchment), was one of its most important aspects, since the production of multiple copies gave print preserving power (p. 78). Of course, she follows shortly thereafter with a quote which we remember from the Innis readings week two: "Much is preserved when little is written, little is preserved when much is written" (p.78). This made me wonder what the implications for preservation are in digital media, where the duplicative power as well as the amount of content is far greater than that of print. Will we be able to store it all somewhere? If we can, will anyone care to look it up?

Eisenstien also writes that printing meant that "the reading public was not only more dispersed; it was also more atomistic and individualistic than a hearing one" (p. 94). This again makes me think of the Internet, where the amount and variety of information enables every user to have a more or less personal experience of the web, making the idea of a local community gathering around an oral performer (or a pulpit) for information somewhat alien. She writes that with the advent of print, "while communal solidarity was diminished, vicarious participation in more distant events was enhanced" (p. 94).

This made me think immediately of the power the Internet has to draw together geographically distant cultures over a common concern (more specifically, I was thinking about the topic Jon proposed: Google's outreach program in Darfur). In this respect, we can look at the Internet as something growing out of print, which according to Ong (1982), "locked words into space and thereby established a firmer sense of closure than writing could" (p.145). That "locking into place" gave print the ability to bring people together - Jon, does Google Earth's virtual globe (like print) lock the world into place? You'll have to tell me if I understand your topic right - I'm finding it particularly interesting in the context of this week's readings.

On a somewhat different note, something else that really interested me had to do with the structure of how we read. Ong (1982) brings up Kerckhove's (1981) theory that the growth of left-hemisphere dominance of the brain explains the change from right-to-left writing to the boustrophedon movement (or "ox-plowing" method), and finally left-to-right horizontal movement (p.99). The fact that our brains "evolved" to write left-to-right aside, this method would not have made sense in the print medium. The "ox-plowing" method would necessitate more than "upper" and "lower" cases for letters - there would have to be upper-forward, upper-backward, lower-forward, and lower-backward cases. Today's word processing technology, however, makes this method much more viable.

But why would you want to do that? Well, Ong writes that "Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word" (p.81). Following this, what impact would a re-introduction of the boustrophedon writing style have? Would forcing the brain to read backward enable us to have more abstract thoughts, or change the way we solve problems? How would it transform our consciousness? I'm almost tempted to experiment on myself.

Note: Actually did some searching and found that the following entry was in the Jargon File (a favorite of mine):

boustrophedon /n./
[from a Greek word for turning like an ox while plowing] An ancientmethod of writing using alternate left-to-right and right-to-left lines. This term is actually philologists' techspeak and typesetters' jargon. Erudite hackers use it for an optimization performed by some computer typesetting software and moving-head printers. The adverbial form `boustrophedonically' is also found (hackers purely love constructions like this).

And here is a graphic from Wikipedia that shows what this style looks like in print:



Cool or what!? See you all Thursday.

Posted at 01:44AM Sep 10, 2007 by kfoswald in Week 4  |  Comments[0]