Secondary orality: The silent shout

Kristin Sanders
DTC 375: Language, Texts and Technology
Dr. Farman
Feb. 19, 2009
Essay 2: Orality vs. Literacy
Word count: 1,231

Modern man is devolving into his common ancestor, the prehistoric man. Though once communicative emphasis was placed on text-based systems – primarily in the age of historic man – post historic man and his collective media of choice are making the return toward a more oral culture. I will argue this point through observations of my own, as well as with evidence from Marshall McLuhan, Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann.

For background, prehistoric society was primarily oral in nature, mostly because a written language wasn’t developed until historic man’s era. As discussed in Dr. Jason Farman’s Language, Texts and Technology course, McLuhan believed that prehistoric man could be loosely defined by the following: as having a tighter-knit community; smaller clusters of knowledge, specific to your surroundings and group; homogeneity in day-to-day living; and external memory (because things couldn’t be written down, McLuhan argues the idea of “sensuous perception,” in the sense that your senses must be heightened and the whole body engaged in keeping particular memories, not just the mind) (McLuhan, as qtd. by Farman).

Historic man, McLuhan goes on to explain, is associated with written communication. This next step in mankind’s media evolutionary path gave us written alphabets and languages. Writing became more of a personal experience with less emphasis on the group mentality associated with orality. Man was given false memory, and with the advent of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in the mid- to late-1400s, man suddenly had a veritable wealth of written knowledge at his fingertips, with topics ranging from religion to herbology to accounting. McLuhan’s idea of sensuous perception was taken away through books because of the lack of physical interaction with the task of reading – what’s more, if the book was good enough, your mind was transported to another time and place, separating man further from this concept of a physical, fully-embodied memory.

Presently we are in the age of the post-historic man. Collectively we are in a strange limbo-like existence between orality and literacy. Yes, heavy emphasis is placed on literacy for academic and entrepreneurial successes, but our communicative media has broken away from the restrictions of writing. How often have you known someone who wouldn’t read a book on the premise of waiting for the movie? Instead of spending hours, even days, on the novel, they can fulfill the experience of the story in a couple short hours at the cinema.

Beyond that, we as a society have become dependent on signs and symbols. Rather than the word “Hospital” on a sign with an arrow pointing toward a highway exit, we might see the same accompanied by a dominant symbol typically associated to a medical facility: a solid white “plus-sign” on a blue background. One need not even be fully literate (usually) to know that this somehow relates to the idea of “hospital, this way.” The same thing goes for interstate rest rooms (a bed), food (plate and utensils), fuel (a gas pump, sometimes with a car) and restrooms (“male” stick figure for men’s facilities and a “female” stick figure in a dress for women’s) – cultural indicators have taught us as a society what these signs mean, and we adhere to these standards of graphical representation. Appropriately, these have cut down on the need for a common language and tend to be more attention-grabbing than their literal counterparts (McGann, Drucker).

Text messages by means of instant messenger programs are a good example of the evolution from literacy to orality. The messages sent from computer to computer often were complete thoughts, full sentences and actual words. Over the course of time and human adaptation of this communication medium, sentences such as “How are you doing today?” truncated into “how r u”. Punctuation, grammar, spelling were thrown to the wayside for the sake of immediacy. One could argue even that the “r” and “u” have become symbolic representations of “are” and “you” in the English language. Just as we see the male stick figure on bathroom doors to mean “men,” we see this one character to represent the whole idea.

Orality is a system of immediacy. It takes less time to speak to convey a message than it would to write down the message and have it read – once it’s been relayed, it’s out there. Take, if you will, the advent of cinema and television as forms of entertainment over books. Granted, most of these movies and shows have their foundation in the literary world, but how many of these written tales thusly have their roots in orality?

Walter Ong argues that we are returning to a second orality – one in which there is an emphasis on community, but instead of the small group of your neighborhood, it takes into account McLuhan’s notion of the global village – we aren’t reaching out to our immediate peers; we’re making contact with the entire world. This secondary orality has been aided by the advent of the telephone, radio, television and various other sound-based electronic technologies (Ong, 71). But as Ong goes on to say, this is a more deliberate orality (one we’ve returned to on purpose) based heavily in the literate world – one should know how to read in order to manufacture and operate these communicative tools.

In our quest for second orality, the cell phone has become a popular medium for communication. Not only does one have the option of writing out a truncated text message, but one also has the option of calling a friend or family member and speaking over many thousands of miles of distance.

This notion of long-distance speaking was perhaps inconceivable in the era of original orality. But today, millions of people can experience the same films, the same TV shows, the same digital art galleries and the same Flash-based cartoons online without needing that one common language. We as a global community can see the same “curved road ahead” visual representation, the same red, yellow and green traffic lights, yield signs, “wet road” symbols, “RXR” for railroad crossings and have a similar expected reaction to these symbolic prompts.

Stick figures imperil themselves on a daily basis for the sake of symbolic communications – perhaps they may even endanger themselves more in metropolitan and tourist areas, where the need for “one common (visual) language” is greater. “Do not stick limbs in gator pit,” “do not stand under falling rocks,” “do not let your loose clothing get wrapped in the wood chipper” – these warnings and many more are communicated every day without so many words for the purpose of conveying a language-free, international message of safety.

But this international common language goes beyond the borders of signs and the edges of the silver screen. We experience orality every day, whether we utilize media or not. After all the signs have faded, the movie and TV stars have been forgotten, telephones a relic of the past, even when anthropologists take on the task of studying the Greek alphabet, we will still have ourselves and our stories to tell – about that student who fell from a chair in class; about the location of a railroad; about the dangers of standing under falling rocks; or the legend of a small boy who overcame a giant. Ultimately, this is what makes us an oral culture, and this is what will keep us an oral culture until culture itself is no more than a whisper on the lips of the last man.

Works cited

Farman, Jason. Class lecture: Marshall McLuhan’s “Culture without Literacy.” Language, Texts and Technology. Washington State University, Tri-Cities. Richland, Wash. 3 Feb. 2009.

Jerome McGann. Co-author: Drucker, Johanna. Images as the Text: Pictographs and Pictographic Logic, University of Virginia English Department. 3 Feb. 2009. .

Ong, Walter. “Orality, Literacy, and Modern Media.” Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. Ed. David Crowley and Paul Heyer. United States: Pearson Education, Inc., 2007. 66-72.