Losing Our Orality

As I was reading Ong's "Some Psychodynamics of Orality," I was intrigued to think of what we, as a culture, have lost as we have moved away from the orality of our ancestors. Oh of course we have gained much as well, and those things I would never want to lose. But as we go further into the written and electronic age, we distance ourselves from a very important part of communication and our history.

I still remember my father telling me stories of being a sailor and looking to the skies and repeating the phrase, “Red sky at night, sailors delight, red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.” I love the beauty of this simple mnemonic phrase. It teaches and is easy to remember. As I think of these and other almost lost oral mnemonics, I’m sadden that they are replaced by alphabetic symbols that don’t spell out a word as much as they are short hand for the short hand of language. LOL, OMG, TTFN, WTF etc. There is no richness in these communications; they are short cuts to quasi communications. Nothing wrong with them, I use them all the time. But I morn that my kids are growing up using only this shorthand to communications.

My children are losing not only the richness of F2F communications, but of any communication of an oral nature. Why talk when you can text? Sure it’s faster and more to the point and you can hold multiple conversations at the same time. What is the harm? The harm is that we are losing the oral skills we have needed to communicate since the existence of man.
I can’t imagine Noah sending a text to his family about the boat he was building. Or maybe Lincoln writing the Gettysburg blog. Or Dr. King twittering about his dream.

You can mobilize people via this written/electronic means, but can you inspire them enough to change a nation? Yes, the pen is mightier than the sword, but is the tweet mightier than the spoken word? I don’t think so. As Ong says, “Oral cultures encourage fluency, fulsomeness, volubility.” I think the other side of that is that electronic cultures encourages the opposite.
As we move toward an age that has little or no need for oral skills and functions, where will we end up? An age of uninspired symbols, PDAs, and pretend orality? I say pretend orality because I think as we go toward this end, content in movies and TV will take the place of the need for our own oral skills. Our best ideas will be mimicked notions from the writers of the Simpsons and Gilmore Girls. We will slip into a state of living via fictional characters’ lives. Love will be defined according to chick flicks and men to action figures. Life will be lived virtually. Oral skills gone, interpersonal abilities will be not only be old fashion but become archaic relics of a forgone era.

It all sounds like a bad Sci Fi flick, but as we continue to lose the orality of our past, our future will change, and we may lose for good, the skills and traditions that make mankind human.

Have fun out there.
David Yost
Creative Director

References

Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly, New York: Knopf.

Ong, W. (1982). Orality and Literacy, Ch 3. Some Psychodynamics of Orality,
New York:Methuen.