extensions

The tech-focused blog TechCrunch has today added the ability for readers to post comments in video format. The obvious take against is that it’s simply more of our narcissistic culture coming through, that not only do we have to sift through the banality of the blogosphere’s chattering class, but now we have to look at them too! On the other hand, we could easily see this as a step towards making the web more personal, more human.

(The fact that one of the video comments from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has a dog incessantly barking in the background seems to be a strong argument against this new feature…just sayin’…)

Video commenting does raise interesting questions, though, regarding previous posts I have written, about Walter Ong’s notion of orality and today’s social media. In particular, I wonder if video comments make the blogosphere a more “oral” space? Walter Ong, from a 1996 interview:

Computerized communication can thus suggest the immediate experience of direct sound. I believe that is why computerized verbalization has been assimilated to secondary ‘orality,’ even when it comes not in oral-aural format but through the eye, and thus is not directly oral at all. Here textualized verbal exchange registers psychologically as having the temporal immediacy of oral exchange.

Ong’s “secondary orality” refers to how electronic media can form people into groups, and create communities. The comments section of a blog can be seen, in this light, as something oral, something suggesting the “immediate experience of direct sound,” something that extends us outward rather than inward.

So the question is, does the addition of video to the comments section of a blog add anything to this idea of orality?

After trying it as a reader, I don’t think so. Running through the comments over at TechCrunch, I find viewing the video comments clumsy — you have to break the “flow” of reading, you need to wait for the video to load, you need to deal with uneven sound levels.

And dogs barking.

Part of the experience of participating in a blog’s community is this flow, a rhythm that develops as you read through the comments: you scroll past some, you read through the one’s from people you know, you find key words that catch your eye. Reading through text comments, frankly, is much quicker and “smoother” than clicking on video comments. The fact that it all happens inside your head has everything to do with why reading isn’t as jarring as the videos; yet, at the same time, it seems counterintuitive to “orality” — reading is an interior practice. This paradox is what Ong is getting at in the above quote.

In any case, perhaps it’s just a practice thing, and one day “reading” video comments will seem just as fluid as reading text-based comments.

But, for now, I’m sticking with text.

Ong, in Orality and Literacy, notes how print is a closed medium:

The printed text is supposed to represent the words of an author in definitive or ‘final’ form. For print is comfortable only with finality. Once a letterpress forme is closed, locked up, or a photolithographic plate is made, and the sheet printed, the text does not accommodate changes (erasures, insertions) so readily as do written texts. (pg. 130)

Ong also marks print as an important development in acquiring our sense of privacy, as reading, which previously was a social activity, became silent, an individualistic practice. Print encouraged the “private ownership of words,” and resentment at plagiarism developed as a result.

In contrast with print, the blog is an open medium. It is, most importantly, never final — the reverse chronology of the blog’s posts creates an implicit open-ended form. A post itself can also be edited, and some bloggers, Glenn Greenwald of Salon comes to mind, frequently use an “Update:” to continually add new information to their pages.

The blog, interestingly, parallels in many aspects what Ong and McLuhan call “manuscript culture,” that period of time after the invention of the alphabet, after writing, but before print fully restructured our consciousness:

…manuscripts, with their glosses or marginal comments (which often got worked into the text in subsequent copies) were in dialogue with the world outside their own borders. They remained closer to the give-and-take of oral expression. The readers of manuscripts are less closed off from the author, less absent, than are the readers of those writing for print.

Here the corollary to the blogosphere is evident: comments, a close relationship between “author” and “reader,” the give-and-take of discourse.

Unlike the closed world of print, the blog is open, confounding our previous conceptions of public and private, always subject to edit, always waiting for the next, new post.

The work of medium theorists, such as Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan, has helped awaken us, or, rather, reacquaint us, with our oral past. It is a past that is elusive to those steeped in literacy – Ong, in Orality and Literacy (1982), describes the difficulty trying to “imagine a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything” (p. 31). For oral cultures, phrases such as “look up” or “take a note” or “read through,” phrases which are commonplace and taken for granted today, are empty, as they are visual metaphors, rooted in literacy and writing. Yet the history of oral cultures is rich and extensive, as Ong notes only a fraction of the languages spoken have a literature, and even now, “hundreds of languages in active use are never written at all: no one has worked out an effective way to write them” (p. 7). For oral cultures, speech and sound are primary – this is McLuhan’s “ear man.” In these societies, spoken language becomes a “mode of action,” bounded with magical qualities; words represent power.

Today, even with literacy rates relatively high within American culture, there is a still a lingering oral component within language:

But, in all the wonderful worlds that writing opens, the spoken word still resides and lives. Written texts all have to be related somehow, directly or indirectly, to the world of sound, the natural habitat of language, to yield their meanings. ‘Reading’ a text means converting it to sound, aloud or in the imagination, syllable-by-syllable in slow reading or sketchily in the rapid reading common to high-technology cultures. Writing can never dispense with orality. (Ong, 1982, p. 8)

Similarly, McLuhan (1962) notes for a phonetic alphabet culture, “…there is constant pressure from the subliminal fact that written code carries for the reader the experience of the ‘content’ which is speech” (p. 72). This legacy of our oral past is retained, for example, in culturally significant events, as an officiant who performs a wedding ceremony, a juror who proclaims a defendant’s innocence or guilt, or a President who declares war on another country. Words today are more than simply textual representations of thought; they have preserved the sense of magic and power that was integral to the age of primary orality.

This, then, is the starting point for an examination of the orality of blogging. For the blog is not simply a print medium, not simply textual, but a medium of speech, a collection of conversations (or, in blogger terminology, “comments”) in cyberspace. The words on a blog are more than words; they have power. They represent social acts and practices, and, in this manner, blur the boundaries between the written and oral media spaces within which blogs are situated.

The orality of blogging also creates community. Unlike Putnam’s (1995) bowling metaphor, there is no “blogging alone,” as bloggers, through their conversations, create social bonds in cyberspace. In a similar vein, medium theorists studying oral cultures find that words bring people closer together. Ong (1982) notes the “interiority” of sound, as the spoken word “manifests human beings to one another as conscious interiors, as person, the spoken word forms human being into close-knit groups” (p. 74). For McLuhan (1964), oral man lived in a “seamless web of kinship and interdependence” (p. 50). The world of orality is rooted in sounds, in language, and words that invite participation and community, illustrated here with a post by a Daily Kos blogger:

It turned out that even though I was Wicked Smart, there were others here not only just as smart and aware as I, but some even smarter and more aware than I! I had one convo that went roughly like this. Paraphrased of course…

Me: Well, I disagree!!! I have studied extensively, as an avocation, the way the human brain works.
Other Guy: I am a Neuro-Surgeon
Me: oh.

But I also found PLENTY of folks who were ready and willing to help me…to overlook my ignorance and newness and point me in the right direction to become a productive member of the community. I learned to be a little humble and to listen to those who had been here longer and knew the ropes. Eventually the community accepted me wholeheartedly and gradually I reclaimed my imperious arrogance…..but now molded and modeled to community standards. (buhdydharma, “New Users Guide To DKos”)

If we think of blogging, and perhaps social media in general, in this light, as something more than a textual medium, something closer to our oral past, this opens up many possibilities. If we think of what we do online in terms of “conversations,” then it’s easier to see the social side of these media. Just as, in the real world, what we say and do makes us who we are, what we post, and blog, and create in the virtual world is part of us. While our online interactions are “virtual,” they are real – people are using social media to bond, to explore their identity, to advocate their politics. We’ve even seen the all-too-real downside of social media, with news media reports of cyberbullying, and the sometimes-tragic results.

This idea of orality, and the connection it creates between our non-literate past and our technology-mediated present, helps explain much of why we find social media so very compelling.