visual vs literal

Agustin Tovar
DTC 375
Dr. Jason Farman
2/19/09
Word count 878

Visual/ Orality communication is the foremost form of communication in the world today, where as literal communications are an extension of the visual and the oral.

Oral communication has been around much longer than we have. Animals have communicated with themselves without the use of words, but through gestures and body language for years. Orality predates written communication, and has made itself a tradition in the making of a communication media. It can be said that written communication has revolutionized our society, but it can always be traced back as an extension of the oral element.
Prehistory has shown us how communication may have begun. Through hieroglyphics to caveman drawings one can always look back and see these images in how we first spoke to each other without using words. How else would mankind begin to understand one another if they could not communicate graphically with each other?
Body language, movements, grunts and the ability to say something without verbally saying it is as powerful as a written document. In other words, words can turn into action, and action can become progress and progress can be completion.

Orality is a product of the environment, an evolution of a group, a group that can expand a form of communication above their surroundings and begin to increase their awareness towards other groups as well as with each other. The visual in communication is by far its strongest link to reach out to people and make something immediate.
More people in the world could probably recognize an icon of restrooms for men and women, than if it where to actually say mens and women’s restroom. That in a way is influence, since you are saying something without saying it and almost making an order of it. “While literacy extends human possibilities in thought and action, all literate technologies ultimately depend on the ability of humans to learn oral languages”.
(Wikipedia) We needed to learn how to communicate somehow, from the day we were born to our last day in high school we are always learning new ways to learn.









From sights and sounds individuals are treated to an array of different effects that shape what we see and hear, adding a dimension to our life. Everyday we are fixated more on the images from the internet, TV and magazines than the actually written content about the images that we are watching. Secondary Orality, the use of more modern equipment for communication (Ong 71-72), is an expansion of the oral, another media showing the progress of visual/oral communication. It can be argued most people would rather watch or hear something automatically than to mechanically look at something and take it in at a slower rate. We have become a lazy society in wanting the instant as opposed to waiting for it. This is not to impede the importance of orality just a
side effect of it.

An extension of orality is the textual/literary communication. This can be considered the standard in today’s manner of communication. A written piece paper can have more control to it than the person who wrote it, that in its self is power. Writing is only half of our history, how much do we really know about the past before there was writings and record keepings? Since our recorded history only goes so far back, writing is still a recent technology. It has revolutionized the way we were in the 1400’s and into 20th century. It now has a rule, a law, that it abides by and that it is abided by. It has to do with more control and standardization, a form that is structured rather than loose. It allows for legality, rule and placement, a more credible form of truths. Although this is a vast development from grunts and body movements, writing came from speech and sound, a direct evolution of media “remediation” from the prehistoric man to
post historic man.
Marshal McCluhan argues “that writing controls space and creates an inner dialog”. That holds true, but in a deeper sense doesn’t that take away from the physical, the communal part of the communication and should that not be present to fully ingest what communication is? It does, but in today’s modern world of communication you would think not because of our societies hunger for the instant and quick, and time is limited so we don’t take in enough and instead move on to the next text message. The intimacy of writing is no longer their. A complex but true statement, our societies


desire for new ways to communicate, third world countries that had traditional orality now want what Americans and other more modern countries have. Taking away from tradition if not helping making it obsolete. As a society we are always trying to find the best ways to communicate, to find the slickest way to talk etc. But we will always be like infants in learning something new, through site, sound and touch before we move on to the next stage of communication.








WORKS CITED
Crowley, Heyer. Communication in History: Technology Culture and Society
United States, 2007 Ong 71-72

”Orality”. Wikipedia. 2009. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.. 19 Feb 2009-02-19
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orality