Orality and its Dominant Role in American Culture Creation

Daniel Bates
DTC 375: Language, Text, & Technology
Dr. Jason Farman
Thursday 19, 2009
Word Count: 1064

Culture is an extremely difficult topic to cover and to make matters more complex, America has many mixed facets of culture. Though in this essay I will only concern myself with textual and oral based cultural characteristics, focusing mainly on school and law settings to be specific; I believe these categories are the largest and most applicable to everyday life. I wrote this essay to show in a step by step process how American information acquirement, comprehension, application, and culture creation is based on oral input.

The textual rules information acquirement, plain and simply. All information is and can be made available in written format (excluding, of course, memory of a physical experience). It is in fact the preferred learning format for every institution in America. This is because written format can be easily standardized and corrected in mass production, starting in 1455 with the production of the printing press. I emphasize corrected, because monks did a fair job at the standardization process long before the printing press. Many school books come out with a new edition every school year as a result of easy correction and printing. I will give texts this credit - They are consistent on a scale not attainable by oral communication. Speeches cannot be as standardized or monotonous as a text can be, as they depend wholly upon presentation skill and memory. Havelock (1963), once a classicalist professor at the University of Toronto, expresses similar views in saying that the non-oral, rule abounding print, started in Greece, created modern thought by giving us a certain and quick way to remind ourselves of information (Preference to Plato). Jason Farman, Assistant Professor and Director of the Digital Technology and Culture Program of WSU, brings up an interesting dilemma facing textual information gathering. He says that textual communication lacks substance, since it can't use the body and all of its gesturing and spontaneity (personal communication, 2009). What information acquirement is also missing is a finality of application; information acquirement is by no means the ends. Research by David Crowley and Paul Heyer in Communication in History - Technology, Culture, Society, gives us an applicable story written by Socrates about the Egyptian god of lettering, "You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom," (p. 36). Much must be done to solidify the information and this brings me to my next point.

Orality dominates information comprehension. Although this concept may seem obscure, it is one we can all testify. For those of us who attended school, oral communication played a very large role in learning. Teachers may teach from the book, but they never teach by just reading. No, it is in their job description to promote understanding in more readily apprehend-able word choices and examples. Texts often limit information given for marketing sake, and thus ignore critical knowledge needs of the students, but I'm glad to say the internet may help change this with the abundance of hyperlinks and academic search engines; the only problem is not all reading is done in an academic electronic media. Also, to many teachers' credit, communication is often two ways, by this I mean, teacher to student as well as student to teacher. This creates a double door of information flow and benefits everyone greatly. Another good example can be found in the courtroom, more specifically, the witness stand. The stands are there for the interrogation and testimony of subjects; however, its placement is riddled with controversy. The subject sits quite close to the criminal or accuser and often displays wild inaccuracies due to the decay of memory over time. It is, therefore, a wonder why the court system does not just use police documentation. Yet we need witness stands due to the importance placed on the impact of live testimony. The jury needs to see, feel, and hear the defendant and accuser plea their case, because the law system values that input. The law has always served its purpose as the informative guideline to the oral judgment. Hilariously, we read about extrapolated judgments and wonder, how and why, simply because a textual presentation doesn't infer full comprehension. The class and court room are where questions are answered and knowledge created by these means, which is beneficial because it is this knowledge which creates the next step.

The third step is the creation of application through knowledge. Application being literally anything created through concept. I'm going to make a brief leap into the philosophical here, but it is the next logical step that knowledge causes through oral means. That which is naturally created has existence that precedes knowledge, which is to say the natural precedes concept of the natural. However, all manmade creations simply use the naturally created to construct new formations, such as a pyramid, dam, paper, etcetera through concept. For concept is mandatory to construct. Comprehension of this will elevate orality's importance. Textual information may assist in creating knowledge application, but orality is the key to creation. Again, all applicability demands concept, and this brings me to my last major point.

It is our applications that define our culture. Of course, if not for the oral input, our culture would be much less characteristically defined. Textual communication does little to define, where as orality turns information into application of culture, culture being the technique and system of teaching knowledge, remarks Mark Mansperger, Sociocultural Linguistics Professor of WSU (personal communication, Jan. 22, 2009). We see evidence of orality creating culture long before "historic man," as McLuhan describes it (Essential McLuhan, 1997, p. 112). We have good reasons to believe this, given the sustainability of memory through mnemonic thought patterning instead of text recollection (p. 68 Communication in History). But could historic man come to create a purely textual America? I assuredly doubt it, given the seemingly inherent importance placed on orality. We can see the inherent quality of orality in the widespread use of it as a primary means of information comprehension. Culture is a constantly changing societal behavior, however, so naturally, there will be some shifting.

I would thus make the claim - We are still a mostly oral based culture. I wouldn't deny a strong shift towards textuality with the implementation of mass print, but I also would not believe it to replace the dominant roles oral communication has.

References

Havelock, E. (1963). Preference to Plato. Harvard University Press.

Crowley, D., Heyer, P. (2007). Communication in History - Technology, Culture, Society. Pearson Edu. Inc.

McLuhan, M., McLuhan, E., Zingrone, F. (1997). Essential McLuhan. Routledge.