have noted some pages that might be relevant to blogs; also interested that he says that in a funny way, orality, by necessitating patterns and repitition and formulae, actually created stability, whereas writing, by allowing us to put the words down and separate them, created the potential for a more flexible word-world.

have been reading Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy, and trying to work it into the essay based on my presentation.

many notes I should have put on my blog, because they don't fit into the essay.

blogging draft here for work in progress purposes:

This essay will attempt to draw out and make explicit the role of words in our consciousness and day-to-day lives, and how the differences between oral and written speech affect the role words play.
I will also try to suggest some ways in which the transition of “written” words to electronic media further complicate our relationship to words and, by extension, to our sense of our selves.
Some of the ways we use words are so deeply ingrained that we overlook them altogether; these could be cast as wrong turnings in our self-image, or more usefully, could be brought to the fore to raise questions about our everyday text-based practices.
To tease out the assumptions we make about words, I’ll start with Rene Descartes, whose “cogito ergo sum” (*1) – I think, therefore I am – can shed light on those potential wrong turnings.
The cogito makes the point that our own existence, as expressed through thought rather than a relationship to an objective world, is all we can really be sure of. To accept this, thinking is what we are.
In this context, the use of words as vehicles for thought privileges them as a kind of medium for being.
We often assume that we think in words, partly because our expression of our thoughts is normally shared in words. But words are subsequent to consciousness and it is possible to be aware of the self and indeed to think without them.
**quote from Consciousness Explained. A personal example: last week I had a dream in which I looked at my mobile phone and realized it could display on its screen information about which of my friends was close by.
To explain that understanding exactly, it would take me many many words, and more to say how it related to the rest of the dream. I didn’t think that in words, I just comprehended it in an instant.
It’s not a case of a picture speaking a thousand words, but of knowing something, grasping it without the mediation of words.
(This is not to dispute Ong’s assertions that word technologies help heighten and shape consciousness and allow it to perform tasks otherwise impossible) , *2 179).
In general, people do act as if words equal thought. Phrases like “say what you think” imply that it’s really possible to do so.
So we act as if the cogito, the thinking self, can actually be expressed, got across, communicated, through the medium of words, whether written or spoken.
(Descartes went on to articulate complex ideas about the mind-body split, but there isn’t room for that here.)
Tofts (*3, p49) says literacy is a way of mediating consciousness, in effect – we use the technology of language to construct the thoughts that are us.
If we think of the idea of the manifesto, we can see how we treat the word as a manifestation of the self – think of the manifesto – manifest, * to be, “o”, I.
But the self-as-thought still doesn’t seem like enough to explain what is is to be a human.
Even though it may be all we can objectively be sure of, our instincts tell us there is a world out there made up of things and other people.
All the time, we are trying to communicate with each other in a shared world, to develop intersubjectivity and to feel part of a group rather than simply a self.
The task words are assigned is to communicate our thoughts, or to describe a shared world.
Ong (4) says in truly oral cultures, speech – the use of words – is an act of doing something to the listener.
But in writing, and fixing a part of ourselves, we create an object that can live and stand for ourselves in our absence (a gap that Ricouer has noted, 5). What a difference it makes to our sense of self to be able to write it down, to send it off into the blue, to use our power of speech, of telling people of ourselves and issuing commands, at a distance? (Searle’s “perlocution” sent off like an extension of ourselves, 6) This is the root of what we now call telepresence, not the computer-based software defined as telepresence by NASA’s Scott Fisher (*7)
The very possibility of this is why I don’t think we can really claim that we live in a “oral culture”, despite the amazing amount of talking that goes on.
The practice and possibility of recording words and passing on ideas between people who have never met, of posthumous letters and directions given at a distance, took the thing that it is to be a human – to think – and effectively made it separate from actual humans (some people call this a realising of the mind-body split, but I think the mention of bodies in that context is a distraction – this is more of a mind-thought split. The fact that bodies are also where minds reside is in a sense coincidental.)
All of this relies on writing, as Ong shows. The objectification of words he explicates is heightened by print. (*8, p 118)
Darren (*9 39) puts it this way in writing about oral cultures “the locus of such a culture was the …. association of a person’s physical presence with their being.”
Havelock (*10)– though I think he goes way too far in saying “speech is primary” – does make a good point about numbers and how much easier they were to develop. I think this might have been because numbers, per se, aren’t like words; they don’t pretend to stand for our actual thoughts. we don’t think in numbers, we tend to think about them.
Another way of approaching the “mistake” of equating our thoughts with our words, is to look at Freud’s article on the Mystic Writing Pad (11). Instead of focussing on the analogy he creates for memory, consider the writing pad itself; the idea that taking a note is “remembering” a thing itself is exactly where we go wrong, or at least make an assumption.
The different media we use, from quill to the computer, encourage different modes of expression, which we then internalise and interpret as ways of being. Ong says that some modes of thought, such as complex philosophy, are effectively carried out via the technology of writing, and would be impossible without them. (12)
To me, this suggests a corollary that makes recording and communication technologies really interesting; by looking at what we take with us from one “way of being” to the next, as well as what is specific to each, I think we can start to work out some things about what we really are, as opposed to how we show it.
For instance, take real spaces versus so-called virtual spaces. Before writing and then telecommunications, to share a space with someone had no other meaning except to be in the same space as them physically. But we’ve taken to the idea of virtual spaces like ducks to water – despite the student in this class in an earlier year (13) who drove three hours to be here, we generally accept that being on the phone with someone is to share a “space” with them, and that each time we go back to this subject’s Web site, we are entering the same space, even though we may be physically at school, work or home at the time. The virtual space is now so acceptable a concept that it suggests to me that we have some kind of archetype of space built into us that we can adapt to any environment, and it doesn’t require physicality.
Similarly, if you look at the way people anthropomorphise computers and cars, you can see that we have a natural tendency to treat things that behave like entities as if they were entities.
(And in a Heideggarian aside, if they are entities, we treat them as sharing our world; and if we share their subjectivity, they can change the very nature of the world we feel we live in.)
Anyway, back to words.
Not only do we treat words as projecting ourselves & and our thoughts, we can act as if words are things.
There was a quote about writing being “trapped words” in last week’s readings. *14
There’s also an idea that words are “trapped things”, which Derrida *15, Derrida in ong 179), identifies as logocentrism.
Havelock (* 16, p17) talks about three kinds of rudimentary writing – the third is “the act of naming these objects and the art of relating names and therefore objects to each other.”
Names and therefore objects. To name is to own. This refers back to the magical concept that your “true name” had a certain power over you.
Knowing the words for things makes us feel like masters of our domain; whereas if you can’t write it down, can’t hold it, you have to deal with it more directly, be involved.
ToftsDarren quotes Plato, (17, p 42), saying that words are the impressions of actual things, and written words are at one remove from the spoken – only signs of something more real.
This passage from Plato suggests that writing will in fact take the ideas out of our heads altogether, by weakening our memories. I like to think of it more as a supplement, an extension – but there’s that extension word again. It is an “outering” of our selves, as McLuhan would have it.
But there is some truth to Plato’s observations, and Ong has noted how that tendency to put information outside the mind’s memory has increased with each new technology. (18) literacy has become information literacy, the ability to find information rather than know it. What we need to do is not to condemn that, but to be aware of its effects and make a conscious decision about whether we accept it as a mode of learning and knowledge or not.
Plato argues that speech was somehow more real, (19) and again, I think both speech and writing have the same limitations of being a system for representing internal truths; I don’t see why one is supposed to be better than the other because we do it with our mouths and not our hands. Ong says that it’s about presence, but allows that writing has its own advantages.
(An aside: I recently read an article (20) that suggested there was/is a gene for being able to speak – it affects the fine motor capability of the throat and mouth – and suggested that gene swept through the species incredibly fast.
I wondered why that was, what a difference there was between the talking and non-talking protohumans that spread the gene so fast. did the talking ones say “let’s kill those non-talking buggers over there”? – or was it more a case of “hey baby, you and me, let’s reproduce”? or just that they became more efficient at the job of staying alive, eating and making sure offspring grew up?
More seriously, I’d question Havelock’s idea that speech is “biologically encoded, writing is not.” (21) Ong supports this by pointing out that every normal human speaks, (22) but couldn’t writing employ the same natural capabilities?)
Plato’s argument is really about authority; about who is saying something. and it still matters today, postmodernism or not, who wrote the words.
Plato (23 138), it talks about needing to have many kinds of knowledge of a thing, not just the name; but we often act as if the name is the thing and knowing it means knowing the thing.
Which brings me, again, to the outering that speech and writing constitute, and the idea that writing is a further extension than speech can provide.
Tofts Darren says (24, p36) that writing is a technology, that we have to learn to write the characters. Again, I wonder what the difference is between this and speech? They may be arbitrary characters, but they represent speech more or less exactly.
What is really interesting is the persistence of writing, the ability to make a whole thing of words that, as speech, only exist sequentially. Ong helps us understand why the novel is a written form, but the epic poem is oral; the novel is something that comes into being written, is meant to be read exactly as it is written; to some extent I think that makes the words themselves rather than the meaning even more important, increasing the “outering” of meaning in writing.
What I don’t think we have fully explored is we’re doing when we project ourselves through writing, and how that affects the “self” we keep behind.
From what Tofts writes on Derrida (25, p 43), we have to grapple with how close we can get to the thing (the person, in this case) through signs; there is always a differerance, a gap between reality and meaning
What Barthes (*26 find this) writes on “the death of the author” turns it around, and says the action isn’t with the writer but the reader – but I wonder how that addresses the lives people “live” in virtual, text-based online communities, where their words effectively are their only embodiment, and are written for themselves (to create themselves) as much as for any reader. Perhaps this is a hint of a return to words as doing-something, not objects.
Ong, too, seems to overlook (or be unaware of in 1982) of the oral culture-style potential of the electronically “written” word. He stresses how print makes “things” of words (27, p 99) , but in a word processor, they are not fixed, but fluid and capable of changing in time as the spoken word does.
If, as one of Ong’s chapter titles suggest, “writing restructures consciousness”, the special features of electronic writing of the words we think we think with, and which we use to manipulate our shared worlds, must potentially offer a new kind of mediated consciousness.
But as we explore it, we need to be constantly trying to stay in touch with the unmediated self, in order that we can use the new technologies rather than having them shape us against our intentions.



references

1: cogito ergo sum from Descarte

2: Ong, 179

3: tofts

4: ong on speech doing something to the other person.

5: ricouer on the absence of the writer, in Ong 171 or find original notes from philosophy.

6: searle on perlocution, Ong 170 or find original notes.

7: Fisher, S., “Virtual Interface Environmnets”, from B. Laurel., ed., The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, Menlo-Park, Addison-Wesley, 1990, p 427.

8: Ong

9: tofts, p 39

10: Havelock

11: Freud on mystic writing pad

12. Ong, 173

13) tofts, in class, date

14: find “trapped words” quote

15: derrida in Ong, 179

16: Havelock, p 17

17: tofts, p 42

18: ong, 79-80

19: phaedrus, plat. on why speech is more real

20: speech gene reference

21: Havelock on speech being biologically encoded, writing not.

22: ong on every human speaking – need to find.


23: plato, page 138

24: tofts, p 36

25: tofts, p 43

26??? no idea? where is the barthes piece referred to?

27 ong, p 99

wanna see my homework?

apparently we did all this cool abstract stuff last week, according to Darren.

thoughts: the difference between cybertext and text.
I think that the thing you do when you read is not the same thing as cybertext coulddo.

for a start, a read text only exists in the readers' mind.
a real cybertext should respond in that recursive, "cyber" way, so it should change and morph - or branch endlessly, a la Borges - as it's read and re-read by different people.

other questions from last week: is "closure" real (as in physical ends of documents) or conceptual; when you've finished reading that document, though it is unfinished, or when you've found enough information in ten places? the end of a virtual document, in other words.

Darren says "most text is highly determinate" while hypertext is not supposed to be. I think that's silly. no reason hypertext can't be provisionally or variously determinate.
in fact, a bit more determination, or guidance, is what a lot of hypertext needs. though when it's done, it's not always done by writers, but by designers or "information architects"

nodes and links: a binary and at the same time the one thing.
to me, nodes are content and links are the nature of the media.
and I wonder: what does it mean to be a "media junkie"? is it the information we get off on, or the experience of swimming in the media itself?
and does what the Pope says about the Web fit into this? he talks about depth vs information. or the nun who wrote his speech does.

and, Darren says we talked about: (though I'm sure Idon't recall!) how writing is a vector for information, and how modern telecoms are really just a faster way of doing that. maybe.

and I wonder about the structure of relationships and the effects of juxtaposition.

oh, and he talked about how hypertext is a grammar of "elsewhereness" but I don't understand that.

and someone during the week said that in writing, you need to get people from A to B - physically move them around in the book. so how does that work in the jumpy, "disjunctive" (Darren says) world of hypertext?
(and isn't this disjunctive enough!)

and he suggests that hypertext could be a kind of syncopation, a disjunctive noise: but I hate jazz. where's the blues, the music with soul, rhythm and depth?


(if this cuts out quickly, it's because I have to publish to save and I'm supposed to be working on a hypertext in class)

HAM 517 CULTURAL CONVERGENCE

SUGGESTED ESSAY QUESTIONS


As I have suggested previously, these are merely suggested topics. I am eager for people to formulate their own topics in consultation with me. However you may choose one of these, or alternatively modify one to suit you particular interests. Regardless of which option you choose, I will be consulting with everyone in due course to discuss an essay plan.

1). Critically evaluate the contention that writing is the foundation of cyberculture.

2). Critically evaluate the contention that writing forms the basis of the new on-line
communications environments made available by formations such as the Internet.

3). Communications theory emphasizes the importance of the interplay of the senses in
any given communications environment. Discuss McLuhan’s “sense ratios”, or Ong’s “
“sensorium” .

4). Take any example of new media we have discussed (hypertext, virtual reality), and
comment on the ways it alters our sensory engagement with the world.

5). Take any concept we have discussed (telepresence, hypermedia, post-symbolic
communication) and critically evaluate its contribution to the field of communication
studies.

6). Evaluate any example of new media in the light of McLuhan’s contention that the content
of any new medium is the work of an old one.

7). Will humans inhabit a “city of bits”?

8). Critically evaluate the viability of on-line communications spaces (such as Multi-User
Domains) as new forms of social interaction.

9). How essential is interactivity to new communications environments such as the
World Wide Web?

10). Will humans ever transcend speech and text as fundamental modes of communication?
Is “post-symbolic communication” possible?

Ted Nelson


I DON'T BUY IN

The Web isn't hypertext, it's DECORATED DIRECTORIES!

What we have instead is the vacuous victory of typesetters over authors, and the most trivial form of hypertext that could have been imagined.

The original hypertext project, Xanadu®, has always been about pure document structures where authors and readers don't have to think about computerish structures of files and hierarchical directories. The Xanadu project has endeavored to implement a pure structure of links and facilitated re-use of content in any amounts and ways, allowing authors to concentrate on what mattered.

Instead, today's nightmarish new world is controlled by "webmasters", tekkies unlikely to understand the niceties of text issues and preoccupied with the Web's exploding alphabet soup of embedded formats. XML is not an improvement but a hierarchy hamburger. Everything, everything must be forced into hierarchical templates! And the "semantic web" means that tekkie committees will decide the world's true concepts for once and for all. Enforcement is going to be another problem :) It is a very strange way of thinking, but all too many people are buying in because they think that's how it must be.

There is an alternative.

Markup must not be embedded. Hierarchies and files must not be part of the mental structure of documents. Links must go both ways. All these fundamental errors of the Web must be repaired. But the geeks have tried to lock the door behind them to make nothing else possible.

We fight on.

More later.

•

eastgate system's hypertext resources

an online identity course/experiment using anonymous logons. bibliography might be useful
via jill

the page with her masters plan
not quite where I'm heading; she is interested in narrative, me in identity. but there is common ground.
also would like to find out what she thinks about interactive writing/linked writing.
hmmm.

look! someone else in Melbourne doing a masters' around blogging.

she may even be doing it in more depth, as my thesis is "minor" and I think she's doing a research degree. have mailed her. plus she has cool dreams.

should have posted how this went: fairly weirdly, as it happens. the girl before me was full of intelligent insights into the shorthands used in chat rooms. me, as I read my paper out, realised it was one of those unformed things that make sense when you write them, but to a new reader (or listener) have so many gaps. so I improvised, meaning I added in bizarre asides and examples. that room is WAY too hot, too.
we had a reasonable discussion afterwards, maybe because it was so weird and incoherent that the class had to ask questions in order to understand any of what I'd said. so I guess I'll try to clean it up in the submitted version.

in other news, have not been at class because I'm overseas. also, of course, have not done the reading for these weeks, let alone next Monday's class, which I'll attend with vicious jetlag. and probably make even weirder comments from the bottom of my well.