extensions

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.

I discussed the orality of blogging in a previous post, but, in certain ways, the social media service known as Twitter is something much closer to the world of orality.

Oral cultures distinguish themselves, obviously, with an absence of the written word. Ong, in Orality and Literacy, describes this as 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” are empty, as they are visual metaphors, rooted in literacy and writing. Oral cultures center existence within sound – McLuhan’s “ear man.” Spoken language becomes a “mode of action,” bounded with magical qualities; words represent power. Oral cultures rely heavily on mnemonics and formulas to develop memory systems, as knowledge cannot be written down and persisted.

The focus on sound and memory, at the expense of the visual, creates a different kind of sensory configuration within an oral culture. Now, of course, this is not to suggest the tweets on Twitter exist outside of the realm of the visual. And our senses — long trained in the ways of literacy — are nothing like those of a non-literate culture.

But engaging Ong’s intriguing idea of “secondary orality,” how media has the potential to extend us outward (McCluhan’s “global village”), provides something of a theoretical space to consider the “orality” of social media. Ong has stated:

Oral communication is all immediate, in the present. Writing, chirographic or typed, on the other hand, comes out of the past. Even if you write a memo to yourself, when you refer to it, it’s a memo which you wrote a few minutes ago, or maybe two weeks ago. But on a computer network, the recipient can receive what is communicated with no such interval. Although it is not exactly the same as oral communication, the network message from one person to another or others is very rapid and can in effect be in the present. 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. To handle [page break] such technologizing of the textualized word, I have tried occasionally to introduce the term ‘secondary literacy.’

Terminology aside, it’s clear Ong was formulating something that connects our communicative and technological present to our oral past. With Twitter, there is a parallel to the world of orality in both the ephemerality and the immediacy of the words spoken from user to user.

Unlike a blog, where every blog post and comment is persisted in a database, tweets, for the most part, come and go. There is no long-term storage of posts in Twitter — services such as Tweet Scan can tease out a couple weeks worth of tweets (see here for my most recent), but something I “said” last year? Not there. The words spoken on Twitter are, by nature of the service itself, ephemeral.

And, of course, that’s not the intention behind Twitter. It’s something more like chat — real-time, less permanent…the immediacy of the technologized word.

This, then, is the orality of Twitter — like the spoken word, fleeting, ephemeral, lingering only in our memory.

Walter Ong, from Orality and Literacy:

By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal, and religiously neutral. Print encourage the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space. (pg. 129)

This interiority imposed on our consciousness by print culture is precisely what social media — and blogs especially — are helping to reverse. This is perhaps one of the most significant aspects of today’s media: we are drawn outward, rather than inward.

In particular, the group or community-based blog encourages a “return of the oral,” as the words typed into a blog are not closed, not final, but open-ended, as is a conversation. They’re specifically written with the expectation of a response, inside the blog’s “comments” sections. The “interior conscious” that print encourages is now, on the blog, an exterior consciousness, captured within a database.

The blog is both drawing us outward in terms of relating to other people, and creating an exteriority of thought in its database.

I saw Steven Johnson’s lecture last week at Parsons, part of The New School. It was titled, “The Urban Web,” and its main premise, which ties to Johnson’s outside.in business venture, was to examine how the web is being embedded within our everyday lives.

Most interesting was the review of some of his earlier work, especially his “web as city” metaphor, which he based on the work on Jane Jacobs. For the web to be useful, Johnson argues, it needs to have the same qualities (values, really…) we find in many cities:

• Stranger Interaction — the city’s walkable sidewalks and interesting storefronts encourages interactions, just as the web has forums, blogs, etc
• Serendipity — walkable cities encourage chance happenings, something less likely in car-based surburbia. He calls this “swerving” — how you’re walking down the street and see something interesting and decide to take a peek. Swerving in a car means something very different. Web sites like Boing Boing epitomize the kind of serendipity found on the web.
• Neighborhoods — just as distinct neighborhoods form in a city, the web encourages spaces of like minds. Sites such as Daily Kos…
• Order From Below — this is the “grassroots” effect. Digg, for example.
• Density — lots of all the above packed into relatively small spaces

Today, as technology changes, the “urban web” is no longer a metaphor; it’s reality. The web is turning into the geographic web, as it becomes an interface to the real world. An early example of this was Meetup, which became most well-known with its association with the Howard Dean Presidential campaign, as his supporters used Meetup to organize their real-world meetings.

An important reason the urban web is forming is mapping technology. Both Yahoo and Google have added maps to their sites, and through opening their maps through programming interfaces, the field of “amateur cartography” has developed. With some relatively simple programming skills, anyone can overlay the geography of the material world with what they think is significant. So, for example, people have created maps of the “best bike routes through Brooklyn.” The web has become a “filter and user interface” for the real world.

Johnson noted that the major roadblock today preventing the geo-tagging of everything from happening is the web is not organized geographically. The web works today through both standard virtual locations (URLs), and through standard time stamps (made possible because of blogs).

But what the web cannot do is: “Find what everyone is saying about the schools within one mile of my house.”

That, of course, is the problem Johnson’s outside.in is trying to solve.

The reminder of the lecture was generally about outside.in, how it works, where it’s going next. One interesting idea was an integration with Twitter, so that as you walk around the city (presuming you’re using an iPhone, for example, with geo-location built-in), outside.in will send tweets about the places you’re passing, as well as tweets your followers where you are at any given time.

Frankly, it all sounds way too much like a technological panopticon for me. To his credit, Johnson did state that when implementing this technology, they will be very conscious of making this an “opt-in” service by default, meaning you have to explicitly tell the site you want it to start tracking a tweeting where you are to everyone.

Because the lecture was for Parsons, it was much less theoretical than I would have liked, but Johnson is a very interesting and entertaining speaker, so it was well worth it. I should add, he was extremely gracious in the Q&A, and really tried to answer everyone’s questions.

A couple of weeks ago, on a Thursday night, I came home and put on the DVR, expecting to watch LOST. To my dismay, the recorder, for whatever reason (damn computers…), decided not to record it that night. So I thought I would try watching the free, streaming version off ABC’s web site the following night.

Not fun.

Before my complaining, though, it’s worth discussing a bit about how we use media. Television is one-way — we sit back on the couch, and we soak it in. The Internet is interactive — we proactively click on things to make other things happen. Dan Harries, in an essay titled “Watching the Internet” from his 2002 The New Media Book, summarizes these two somewhat opposing media practices, and calls for something new:

…one of the central modes encouraged by the internet is that of ‘viewing’, literally the online viewing of movies in a manner that loosely emulates the viewing of films in the cinema…A second mode is that of ‘using’ new media with users following more ‘computer oriented’ activities, such as exploring hyperlinked Web pages or playing online games…Yet what happens when both of these modes are integrated in a manner where the using affects the viewing, and vice versa?…I call this third emerging mode of spectatorship ‘viewsing’ — the experiencing of media in a manner that effectively integrates the activities of both viewing and using…

Viewsing is something like what MIT’s Henry Jenkins calls “convergence.” It’s the new form of participatory media we see emerging all over.

Now, getting back to LOST. The series certainly has strong viewsing elements to it — the fans are completely engaged, and the producers are not only aware of this, but use their fans’ feedback, incorporating it into the narrative. (Season Three’s “Expose” episode, for example, where Nikki and Paolo were killed off, was largely a gift to the fans, who never warmed up to those characters.)

But the experience of watching LOST online was terrible, because it incorporated the worst elements of “using” and “viewing” the web. The HD-quality stream looks great, and, connected to the home theater system, provides a terrific “viewing” experience. We dimmed the lights, sat back on the couch, and soaked it in. Until…

The commercials. Which are fine; we’re all used to that (although watching LOST on a DVR allows you to roll past them). But you’re not just required to watch the commercials — you physically have to click on the “continue” link on the web page to see the rest of the show. And this happens several (five or six?) times throughout the episode.

So much for sitting back on the couch and watching in HD.

Obviously, the producers assume most people watching are doing so at a desk, or on a laptop. But with Apple TV, and other web/video delivery mechanisms that continue to push media onto our 36″+ HD screens, watching the Internet becomes an increasingly passive experience — more “viewing” than “using.”

Until media producers figure that out, I’m hoping my DVR doesn’t forget to record LOST anymore…

On Friday, I presented my paper, entitled “Virtual Memory: The Blog as Technological Prosthetic,” at the NSSR Interdisciplinary Memory Studies conference. It went very well overall, but the most difficult part of presenting a paper is the Q&A that follows. I think I did OK, but, now that 48 or so hours have passed, I think I have much better answers to the questions I received.

First, I was asked about the materiality/immateriality of the blog; that is, it’s in cyberspace, and “not-there,” yet there is a physical component to it all (servers, network connectivity), and it is really “memory” when we’re so often disconnected to the net?

It’s a great point. I think that bloggers, given they are constantly blogging, are perhaps more connected than others throughout the day. But there is also an asynchronicity to blog conversations — bloggers can carry on, indifferent to time in this sense. One person speaks, and the replies may come back in a few minutes, or in a few days. Within the subjectivity of the blogger, within these asynchronous conversations, memory is available when needed.

There are also other forms of social media — Twitter comes to mind — that perhaps approach real-time and connectedness more than the blog. Because Twitter, for example, works across platforms, including cell phones, the “tweets” that take place are much more accessible, and take place more in “real life.” Unlike the blog, though, Twitter provides little to no memory, as the tweets aren’t stored in a database, and, in this respect, look more like the ephemerality of primary oral cultures.

The next question was whether I wasn’t really talking about an “archive,” rather than “memory.” I think here, we need to question further the nature of an “archive.” First, to me, an archive is something distant — the stacks in the local library. As the time and distance decreases between “I need to remember something” and “here’s the answer” — that is, as we’re able to google our answers as we need them, I think the notion of “archive” begins to wane. Google Books, for example, is an effort to essentially digitize every book — this, I think, changes the meaning of archive. Increasingly, as we search google for, say, Deleuze, we turn up the actual words of Deleuze (his books), rather than the words of other people talking about Deleuze.

At some point, as things can be instantaneously recalled, as we become continually closer to our technology, doesn’t the divide between memory and archive simply cease to exist?

I also think an archive is something fixed. Again, the stacks of books. And yet, the kinds of memory we’re building in a digital age — wikipedia, for example, is hardly fixed. Digital archives/encyclopedias/memories can be updated, and changed. Fixity is lost.

Finally, with respect to the blogger, the memories stored in the database are actually often retrieved and actively “used.” This is because the hypertextual nature of blogging requires an active use of memory — bloggers are extremely self-referential. So, for example, if I want to comment on something I said last week on the blog, my comment will include a link back to that previous post. The form and style of blog culture is heavily reliant on memory, heavily reliant on the ability to find prior blog posts and prior blog comments. In the subjectivity of the blogger, the constant use of the database is something more “active,” something much “closer at hand,” than the term “archive” implies.

But, um, yeah…should have thought of all this when the questions were asked. Not 48 hours later…

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.

Last week, I attended a lecture by Prof. John Thompson (Cambridge) on “Books in the Digital Age.” And, in a discussion re: the academy and books and how they operate, Prof Ken Wark (from NS Sociology) made the point that, for students today, books are somewhat irrelevant. Instead, he presented the metaphor of the Professor-As-DJ, pulling PDF texts from here and there, remixing theory into a mashup we call “class.” And, for the most part, that’s true — most of my classes don’t have “books,” but readers, collections of texts.

I mention this, because, I’ve read D&G’s “Rhizome” chapter probably five or six times now, and I still don’t get *a lot* of it. And it makes me wonder, as I so often do when reading some of these authors for our classes, French philosophers in particular, what is it? Is it the translation? Are these guys just being purposefully obscure, a sort of hiding the fact that they don’t really have anything to say? Or, is it me — am I either not bright enough to grasp all this? Or, my point to all this, is it because I’m reading the chapter, instead of the book? Is there context that I need to really get this?

That said, I do get it enough to know that D&G’s work is important, because we just have to look at the world around us to see that their notion of rhizome explains much of what’s happening. Social networking, viruses like SARS, terrorist networks, new military models in response to terrorism threats, genetic research, new science understanding swarming behavior — all of this has become predominant in our culture in the last 10-20 years, and, if we look at previous cultural models, none seem adequate in describing just what’s happening today. None of them get to this idea of “connectedness,” which today is so predominant. And connectedness can be both positive (Wikipedia) and negative (SARS).

Multiplicities…always n-1. The network is always defined in terms of “taking-away-ness” — that speaks to the unstable nature of the rhizome, the idea that it’s never “one thing.” And, more importantly, it can never be broken, only changed. Ruptured, but continuing to flow…

One thing I did find intriguing was D&G’s description of the book as a machine, something seen in Aarseth:

As the cyber prefix indicates, the text is seen as a machine–not metaphorically but as a mechanical device for the production and consumption of verbal signs. Just as a film is useless without a projector and a screen, so a text must consist of a material medium as well as a collection of words. The machine, of course, is not complete without a third party, the (human) operator, and it is within this triad that the text takes place. The boundaries between these three elements are not clear but fluid and transgressive, and each part can be defined only in terms of the other two.

D&G say this triad (or, at least, a similar one…) no longer holds:

There is no longer a tripartite between the field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders…In short, we think that one cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. The outside has no image, no signification, no subjectivity.

In Aarseth, he’s suggesting something that’s not obvious, that the book is nothing without the “third party,” the human “operator.” D&G — I think(!) — are saying something similar. We cannot separate our or divide from us what we create. There are no clean and clear lines between “subject” and “representations” of our world, because there is no “One,” there is no singular subject, only connections, only multiplicities.

“A multiplicity has neither subject nor object.”

This seems a rather radical statement, tossing aside the notion of subject/object, self/other, that’s been an essential element of thought since we started thinking. But, in light the idea of virtuality, and the messy kind of reality our networked lives in cyberspace have made, it makes sense. We need new terminology to describe this new sense of being, how we all exist now with on foot in the physical, and one in the virtual.

One question that I’ve been thinking about as I’m working on my final paper for my Digital Media Theory class is: “What if the server crashed?” That is, what would we lose if our virtual existences one day simply vanished?

It’s easy at first to think, “not much.” But, I can only speak for myself, it’s much more than that. There’s a good amount of thinking, of identity creation, of writing that I’ve invested online. And the more I put myself out in cyberspace, the more difficult it becomes to leave it.

I’ve (we’ve…?) grown dependent on our virtual lives, it’s more than an objective “other,” and, yet, it’s still difficult to think of it in the subjective sense.

Is it me, or is it my avatar?

So, I think what D&G have opened up is a new way to consider all this, new paradigms and descriptions and categories. And we need it…we’re tired of trees…