[…] It may be that our world is becoming less a culture of literacy, in Ong’s sense, than one of textuality, characterized not by the mere presence of reading and print language but by the massive proliferation of media texts and their centrality to the human experience. Digital practices — message boards, comments sections, and SMS as well as gifs — are textual without producing the decontextualization, distanciation, and abstraction that Ong associated with the culture of literacy. “Writing fosters abstractions that disengage knowledge from the arena where human beings struggle with one another,” Ong writes. “It separates the knower from the known. By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle.” But much of what Ong attributed to oral culture also applies to textuality. Implemented in real-time networks, text can shrink distance across time and space rather than emphasize it as the written word did. It destroys abstraction through immediacy. […]
Speech was never a more “natural” form of human consciousness and communication that has been spoiled by inauthentic printed and digital texts. In fact, orality never disappeared, but rather is always continuing to emerge, in broader, more all encompassing forms.
22.05.2019
aber dann Amthor Rezo.