Week Four: Orality v. the Printed Word and other stuff

While Ong's concepts were complex, I felt that I could really appreciate where he was coming from. The idea of oral traditions vs the language of the current interfaces was very interesting. Language is able to create ideas and new worlds, and with the invention of written/recorded conversation, those ideas can reach a greater group of people, and create new ideas for people who may not have ever had access to such possibilities. And, as language and the movement of language changes, so do we.

There does, however, seem to be something lost from the older oral traditions. Now everything that might have been passed by word of mouth is trapped, verbatim, in memoirs, biographies and even fiction. It does not have the option of mutation, at least as much as oral tradition (some notable exceptions being movie or song remakes, especially the Evil Dead movies, since they were remade by the same people). Now, with intellectual and media ownership, that mutation is made more difficult. Back in the day, no one really claimed to own a story.

The benefit, as Ong saw it, to modern storytelling tradition is that it has an opportunity to reach a greater number of people, and the clip that Eric showed was a very nice visual explanation of how the past came to be the future.

I also thought that the idea of Interface Metaphor was interesting, and I did a little bit of further research into the concept, and the idea is mainly contextual. We often associate current experience with past experience, and that seems to be the purpose of interface metaphor. The fact that Ong participated so readily in modern technology is very telling of his forward-thinking abilities. He saw the possibility of the new linear thinking becoming even more intertwined, knowing that individual interfaces might be connected to each other through the contextual application through these metaphoric devices, which is also impressive. This computer language is just the next step in the cycle, as Eric explained it (orality --> written word -->printed word --> electronic word).