Walter J Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
(London: Methuen, 1982). p.179.
Do networked computers constitute a new language dynamic?
If so, how are they influencing the evolution of consciousness?
Ong (p.130-2) lists the following as the effects of print:
1. removed rhetoric from center of academy
2. encouraged quantification of knowledge
3. eventually discouraged iconographic knowledge representations
4. produced exhaustive dictionaries and culture supportive of definitions
5. reinforced language as textual
6. major factor in development of notion of 'personal privacy'
7. created a new sense of private ownership
8. encouraged self-reflexive thought, awareness of thoughts as impersonal things
9. encouraged sense of finished text (final draft, completed work, no marginalia, no erasures)
10. text as subject of literary criticism,
11. text as derived from lived experience (as opposed to borrowed from ancient works in oral tradition)
12 gave rise to romantic notions of originality and creativity
13. birth of textbook which proceeds from definition to definition
14. birth of fixed point of view and fixed tone (McLuhan,1962)
If digital media is accepted as being a dynamic shift in language use comparable to the transition from orality to print, then similar substantiative changes will occur in the evolution of consciousness as the mass of humanity adopts networked digital communication. Ong referred to TV and radio as 'secondary orality'. On that basis, the internet may be 'tertiary orality', but the term may not be apt. Networked computational communication superimposes and potentializes aspects of both orality and print/literacy cultures. Yet it also does more. As an emerging discipline with indeterminant conventions (margins? buttons? motion? links?), it is exhibiting experimental fluctuations. Online interface design is evolving, integrating off-line innovations and introducing new sets of possibilities that are outside the boundaries of oral or print cultures. Networked multimedia introduces unprecedented simultaneous and instantaneous vectors of communication which are altering our collective relations to knowledge: blog comments, social networks, discussion blogs, forums, helplines, chats, mmporg, second life, augmented reality, haptics, biometrics, brain machine interfaces, bots...
What changes will/are occurring?
What are the effects of the internet on conscious perceptions?
1. defocalizing primacy on written word: shift to multimedia
2. visualization of quantified knowledge and eventually emergence of tactile data will re-privilege qualitative and aesthetic aspects of knowledge research
3. rebirth of iconographic representations
4. birth of self-correcting, de-institutionalized, open-source knowledge repositories (wikipedia)
5. language as multi-modal (video,audio,text,interface)
6. major factor in resurgence of public space: social networks, shared bookmarks, shared citations, peer-to-peer networks
7. major factor in resurgence of public ownership : creative commons and open source
8. awareness of thoughts as shared, simultaneous abstract, lifeforms
9. encouraged sense of UNfinished text (blogs, incomplete posts, comments, correctable uploads, redesigns)
10. text as subject of communal criticism / praise : thumbs up or down inside stumbleupon networks
11. text borrowed and woven from other sources online
12 mashups on romantic notions of originality and creativity
13. birth of educational-sites which proceed from link to link
14. birth of networked point of view and rebirth of turbulent collaged tone
Multimedia version to follow.
Labels: dynamic, evolution, literary, orality, printing
[+/-] systemic change subtitle: a pseudo-prophetic interlude
Sustained systemic change (ecologically and economically) will only arise after humans transcend the diverse drives of their embodiment (the need to get more sex, food and power than other bodies); that mutation is statistically impossible in the time left (5 yrs, 10 yrs? 20 maximum) before extreme damage to the ecosystem (our exo-system) caused by the human species begins to feedback on itself and accelerate.
As our numbers increase, this risk increases.
Even benign technologies have output. Nothing vanishes. Imagine we all switch over to solar tomorrow. Everything: all transport, all communication, all lights, all the machines. Free energy is broadcast from a spatial array of sheaths down to catch stations that open up a mesh network. Down to the cities: breeding, buying food, houses, clothes, plastic goods, manipulating matter, racing all over the place out of curiosity or raw desire. Perhaps pollution increases. The energy is free. The heat discharge builds up, the ice melts, lands flood.
Half the earth population drowns, the other half lives on floating cities drinking protein smoothies and expending vast amounts of energy constructing imaginary immersive worlds; vivisecting dogs, cats and chimps in order to find anti-aging pharmaceuticals; harvesting new organs from chimeras (sheep and pig slaves that carry human organs); and fighting wars over fresh water between other scavenging tribes of laser-firing nuclear-armed clouds of autonomous killing machines.
Situationally, reality is sci-fi, but basically its business as usual. Nature's tune has been consistent for millenia: competition is innate. Most living behavior is accurately described by an adolescent catalogue cosmology : find fight fuck feel forget. Life is a set of input-output machines.
Whatever tiny ‘positive’ change any tiny inconsequential human existence might make; change itself will not stop changing things; relentless processes are ruthless. All states are transitory. Utopias and tyrannies emerge and die just as do cicadas, summer storms, and us.
Large scale systemic changes ripple like smooth muscle contractions in the fibre of the universe directed by an intelligence distinctly similar yet separate from humans.
Labels: evolution, humans, organs, solar, tiny, war
