Living in Reality

In Orality and Literacy Walter Ong says:

The highly interiorized stages of consciousness in which the individual is not so immersed unconsciously in communal structures are stages which, it appears, consciousness would never reach without writing. The interaction between the orality that all human beings are born into and the technology of writing, which no one is born into, touches the depths of the psyche. Ontogenetically and phylogenetically, it is the oral word that first illuminates consciousness with articulate language, that first divides subject and predicate and then relates them to one another, and that ties human beings to one another in society. Writing introduces division and alienation, but a higher unity as well. It intensifies the sense of self and fosters more conscious interaction between persons. Writing is consciousness-raising.

Orality ties cultures together. The written word causes more introspective thinking, increasing individuality. Ong claims that although this is dividing it is uniting as well. Perhaps an extension of his argument that oral language awakens the self and then allows us to interact with others?

Marshal McLuhan, drawing on the work on Henri Bergson, sees even orality as a little more divisive.

Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, lived and wrote in a tradition of thought in which it was and is considered that language is a human technology that has impaired and diminished the values of the collective unconscious. It is the extension of man in speech that enables the intellect to detach itself from the vastly wider reality. Without language, Bergson suggests, human intelligence would have remained totally involved in the objects of its attention. Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech. (Understanding Media)

This collective unconscious sounds almost idyllic. How cruel of language to have separated us from it. 

I've recently discovered the Radiolab podcasts. When I was listening to "Lucy" I got a glimpse of what McLuhan is talking about. At one point a man talks about a Bonobos making amends with him after biting him. The animal cried into his mouth. This image is so powerful. Clearly their interaction went far beyond words. Near the end of the show one of the women who works with the Bonobos says she thinks they do have a deeper connection, one that we have lost. 

I've been chasing this idea that the spoken word is closer to meaning. Both Ong and McLuhan might agree with that. Both see communication technologies as slowly separating us from each other although they make different value judgements about those separations. But maybe real meaning can't be reached through language at all. 

I've been thinking about how communication technologies distract us from the reality around us. And not just when we are using them. Our minds have been conditioned by constant exposure to communication media. We are introspective - often living in an interior world. We create elaborate daily and yearly schedules, the maintaining of which occupies a significant portion of our time. Think about that. We ignore the current reality to make sure that we'll be in the right spot at the right time at some point in the near or distant future. We don't know our way around our physical spaces thanks to sat nav (I'm sooooo guilty of this). And this is all not to mention the very obvious escapes from reality through books, television, and the Internet. 

What would it be like to live an unmediated existence? An existence in which there is nothing to take the mind away from reality?

I am a hopeless cyborg, my identity almost inextricably intertwined with technology. The loss I would experience with the collapse of google docs alone would be akin to a lobotomy. But even so, I have been trying to be aware of reality. Not reality as shown to me by my media. Not the reality inside my mind. The actual reality all around me. This is challenging, since, as a graduate student, I spend hours a day on the computer, reading and writing. Sometimes that is my reality. And I stop and tell myself: This is reality. Me, in my workspace, in front of a computer. (The computer is part of reality, not a window into it.) And then there is the reality of walking outside. A human being, breathing the air, admiring the trees, and not thinking of anything else. 

Agony and the Internet

One of the biggest things that struck me on rereading The Shallows in preparation for leading a faculty summer reading discussion at the beginning of this school year was the similarities that Carr points out between the digital word and the spoken word.

He talks a lot about the kind of mind that reading fosters: A mind that can be quiet and focus on a single task for an extended period of time.

And he contrasts that with the kind of mind that the Internet fosters: One that harvests large quantities of information quickly without going too deep.

But in these comparisons, he brings up some ways in which the digital word is taking us back to what came before writing. Primarily, this is social information sharing.

In the oral tradition, sharing information is, by necessity, a social event. One person speaks to one or more people, imparting what they know. The person sharing the information is treated as an authority and can be questioned. Information sharing is interactive. In Orality and Literacy, Ong talks about the agonistic nature of oral cultures. People do battle with words. Think of debate. Think of jokes and riddles.

Writing, and reading, Carr points out, are both solitary events. The piece of writing becomes the authority as the original author can not, usually, be questioned. And the writing continues to say the same thing, no matter what you ask it. There isn't the same back and forth, the same argumentation.

And then there is the Internet. Web 2.0, the social web, to be exact. Yes, we have blogs, facebook, and youtube, allowing anyone and everyone to share content with the multitudes. But more importantly, we have comments. Anyone and everyone can argue with the author, not just the work.

Now think about flame wars. Think about how reading the comment section on almost anything on the Internet can make you lose faith in humanity. People say it is just that people feel more free to be mean online because of distance and anonymity. But I think the driving force behind these arguments may run deep. Like, oral roots deep.

This is the agony. It is the way of social information sharing. I suspect it is a little cruder now than in the old days. But if we understand it maybe we can channel that argumentative energy towards something more productive? I would like to think so.

Empty Characters

This past weekend I attended the American Association of School Librarians conference and one of the many sessions I attended was a panel discussion on boys reading and fantasy, consisting of the following authors:

Jonathan Auxier
Jon Scieszka
Adam Gidwitz
Neal Schusterman
William Alexander
Tony Abbott

So it was bound to be good, right?

This idea came up in the discussion about rich characters and empty characters. But "empty" wasn't a bad thing. An empty character is one that, yeah, might be hard to describe other than "heroic" or something like that. But, because the character is "empty" the reader can see him (or her) self as that character. Examples mentioned were Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker. Their friends are all rich characters, but these leading men don't have quite as much that defines them, and that's a good thing. The speaker even mentioned Tintin, who is drawn with minimal detail, even though the rest of the illustrations are detail rich. The reader can put himself in Tintin's shoes.

Of course this made me think of the stereotypical, archetypal characters that come out of the oral tradition. They usually have only one or two defining characteristics and are not very complex. The wrath of Achilles, anyone? Walter Ong describes how writing has allowed us to come up with more complex, more psychological characters. And yet, we still love our empty heroes.

Is it because we are nostalgic for the epics of the past? Is it because the ancient bards were on to something? Is it because we need to be connected to, to be a part of, our stories?

Another question came up about building upon folktales, myths, legends, etc. and one of the authors told the following joke:

A magician became so great a magician that he told everyone not to call him a magician anymore, but to call him a god.
The God of the land heard about this and they decided upon a duel of the gods.
The God of the land grabbed a handful of dirt, spit in it, molded it, blew on it, and away flew a bird.
The man who was once a magician grabbed a handful of dirt, and just as he went to spit in it, God said, "Hey! Use your own dirt."

The point was that all stories are built on what came before. No one is using their own dirt.

I think this was easier to see during the oral transmission of stories, because there was less focus on the author of a story. Think of how we don't know the author of most folktales, and there are so many different versions. They aren't written. They are collected.

Each telling of a story was slightly different. Stories were constantly both old and new. Connected to an earlier time, but being what they needed to be in this time.

The empty character is an invitation. The storyteller, the writer, knows he has used someone else's dirt. Now he is inviting the listener, the reader, to use his. Come on, he says, be my character.

Scriptura Continua

It's hard for us to imagine today, but no spaces separated the words in early writing. In the books inked by scribes, words ran together without any break across every line on every page, in what's now referred to as scriptura continua. The lack of word separation reflected language's origins in speech. When we talk, we don't insert pauses between each word - long stretches of syllables flow unbroken from our lips. It would never have crossed the minds of the first writers to put blank spaces between words. They were simply transcribing speech, writing what their ears told them to write. - The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, pg. 61

Carr goes on to explain that early readers experienced a "cognitive burden" trying to pick out the words from the continuous line of letters. Spaces were introduced to make reading easier. Hyperlinks and other distractions on the Internet are again creating a cognitive burden, according to Carr, by forcing us to make decisions while we are reading (do I click on the link?) rather than focus on what the words are telling us.

One of my arguments for writing being further from meaning than the spoken word is that writing is a graphical representation of sounds. It refers back to the spoken word, not to meaning. D-O-G tells you how to pronounce the word "dog," it doesn't tell you what a dog is.

The spaces between words, however, are not there because people pause between each word when speaking, but to help readers understand the text more quickly.  They ease the cognitive burden. It is so hard to understand the written word, so laborious, that we have to add things that aren't there so that we can comprehend a text at a speed that approaches our comprehension abilities with the spoken word. And, it is not just spaces we have added. We have punctuation, we have altered word order, we have italics and bold and big and small. All in an attempt to make writing as readily understandable as speaking.

Then there is this business of the Internet. Are we moving further from meaning as we further technologize the word? Um...yeah.

We worked to ease the cognitive burden of reading so that we could spend more time thinking about meaning and less time thinking about deciphering. But the Internet is increasingly distracting - increasingly burdensome. We get so caught up looking for information, we fail to pay much attention to what we find. (This is the main thrust of Carr's book. Forgive me for making these bold claims without elaborating on them. He's done that for me.)

The digital word isn't trying to be like the spoken word. It isn't trying to be easily understood. It is like a living thing, trying only to propagate itself. The digital word is all about more and more and more digital words. But if we are too distracted to pay attention to what these words say and certainly too distracted to remember for more than a few moments - then they don't say anything.

Maybe this is all a little dramatic. Clearly, I like the Internet. Hello out there blog readers, I hope you are enjoying all my tasty digital words! Just try not to forget me when you click on the next link...

Feelings without Words

I've been trying to keep up with reading a meditation by Krishnamurti each day. It is a book I purchased a while ago and recently found. I decided it was better for me to grab that first thing in the morning than my cell phone.

A recent meditation urged the reader to try to feel without naming the feeling. Krishnamurti says naming what you are feeling immediately separates you from it. It makes you an observer instead of allowing you to fully experience the emotion.

As someone who constantly examines what we have gained through the technologizing of the word and what we have lost, it is interesting to me to think of the word itself as the beginning of that chain of technology.

Writing, the printing press, the Internet - each of these technological advancements has allowed us more connectivity but each one challenges us to remember (and think?) less. Did the development of a spoken language have similar costs and benefits?

We need words not for ourselves, but to connect with each other. We use words to tell each other what we feel, to use Krishnamurti's example. And as long as we can't actually be in each other's minds, talking to one another may be the best way to try and understand how another person feels.

Now think about this - we created language to communicate with each other. But, how often do you think without words? I almost never do and I find it very difficult. So why are we always talking to ourselves? Why do we name what we are feeling, when we have the real genuine feeling going on inside of ourselves right this minute. Why look at the substitute instead of the real thing?

Words are funny. They can help us come closer to meaning, but they can also separate us from it. Maybe as a librarian and storyteller I'm not supposed to say that. Really, I think there is a place for all these things. The digital word, the printed word, the spoken word, and no word at all.

The Place of the Spoken Word in the Information Age

I've started the School Library Media program at the University of Georgia with the aim of becoming a Media Specialist. One of the classes I am taking this semester is on technology and relies heavily on online discussion and short written assignments.

In an assignment I am working on I found myself thinking about Ong's claim that people from literate cultures think differently than people from primary oral cultures. I began to realize that, in all likelihood, the Internet (and all that comes with it) is rewiring our minds again. Knowing that we can get information instantly. Knowing that we can disseminate information instantly. Connecting with people anywhere in the world with video conferencing. These things change the way we communicate and the way we solve problems.

Writing provides us with external storage space. We don't have to keep all of our thoughts and computations in our brain. The paper is an extension of our brain. Now the Internet is one big brain extension shared by the world. When the external component of our brain has changed so drastically, the brains inside our heads must be changing to keep up.

Then the question becomes, if our brains are actually changing to better interface with advanced information technology, where does the spoken word fit in? Is there still a place for face to face conversations and live performances in the information age?

The goal of this post is to pose the question, not to answer it. I would like to do some more investigations, but I suspect I will be answering this question for the rest of my professional life. I believe the spoken word does have a place - not just because I want to, but because I still witness it's power on a daily basis. But there is no doubt that, like so many things, how the spoken word serves us today is changing and will continue to change.

Telephone

I was talking to my sister on the phone last night. During the middle of one of my sentences she started laughing. But I wasn't saying anything I would expect her to laugh at, so I was a little put off. I thought maybe she was laughing at something she was looking at or heard unrelated to me. But I wanted to know what it was. "Why were you laughing?" I asked her. She didn't respond right away which put me off even more. Finally we realized there was a time delay.

I have already mentioned that timing is an important element of speech and can aid in understanding. Clearly, bad timing can also hinder understanding. But is talking on the phone really a good illustration of the spoken word in action?

Nope. Telephone conversations are an example of what Ong calls "secondary orality." The progression of written communication opens up new opportunities for spoken communication as well. Talking on the telephone is possible because of writing.

And it is different from talking to someone in person, as my example demonstrates. Talking face to face isn't just about the words coming out of your mouth. It is also about facial expressions and gestures. It is about being in the same spacial and temporal context.

When you talk on the phone you can't see what the other person is doing. You aren't looking at the same things. And, if there is a problem with your connection, the person you are talking to might not hear what you say right when you say it.

Air Quotes

In his book Orality and Literacy Walter Ong talks about how living in a literate society changes the way that you think and speak. Just knowing that writing is possible forces you to put your thoughts together in a different way. So, even when speech is totally detached from the written word, it is still influenced by writing. (Although I am a huge fan of Ong, I don't have the book on me currently. Apologies for not including a proper quotation or page numbers.)

There are many ways that writing can influence speech, but one that quickly comes to mind for me is the use of air quotes. Quotation marks exist on the page and came about after the invention of writing. So what are they doing in our speech?

Most punctuation marks are meant to describe things about the sentance that would be apparent if it were spoken rather than written down. For example, the comma indicates a pause. In speech a pause is necessary to help distinguish clauses. When you are reading you do not actually have to pause, becuase you see the comma, and understand that there is some kind of seperation between what comes before and what comes after.

Exclamation points indicate excitement. Without them it would be difficult to differentiate an excited phrase from a calm one. When someone is speaking they show excitement in their tone of voice. A question mark is very similar in that it clarifies what a sentence on the page is doing. But when a question is spoken aloud you understand it is a question because of how the speaker says it.

There is more to speech than the way words sound. There are all sorts of aspects to speech, such as timing and tone, that help the listener ascertain meaning. The use of punctuation attempts to tackle these aspects.

But I don't think quotation marks work quite the same way. I think if you wrote the way people speak, or the way people used to speak before writing existed, you wouldn't need quotation marks. Quotation marks don't illustrate something people naturally do when they speak, they have deveolped with the complex dialog that only exists in literate stories. Since they aren't from the speaking relm, when we speak the way we write we sometimes need to show that quotation marks are there. So we use our hands.