New Media and Personal Communication
In my post on 11.05.07, I wrote, “We are a writing, electronic, and digital culture. That is, we have writing, so orality is not going to replace writing. … However, what is important to examine is that communication can exist in this New Media (NM) in a form that is more oral than it is textual. “
This is not so radical, when we consider the telephone conversation. We’ve also had video conferencing for quite some time, in which two or more individuals can have live visual conversations from different locations.
New media (and digital orality) stepped in and raised these practices to the next level in a number of ways. First, NM (specifically podcasting through the personal computer) makes this concept of video communication personal, inexpensive, private, and easy. Such a conversation can be live, or individuals can record themselves with simple cameras or hand-held devices and send through those devices to another individual (or many), who can watch the video and, in turn, record a response and sent it back to one or all individuals. In this scenario, one uses writing to understand how to use the camera (what buttons to push) and in the same way, to use the sending/receiving device. However, the Invention it is all largely oral.
Another positive fact with this process is that it is recordable, a condition not present in normal face-to-face conversations, short of intended interviews. While it is technically possible to record a phone call, very few are recorded for other than legal purposes.
But this aspect of orality and NM, that of personal communication is but a small slice of how it is being used and how it can be used. New media, even just basic podcasts, are a major method of moving information such as training, news, entertainment, emergency information, health information (both immediate and preventative), translation, risk management, advertising and marketing, and many other genres and purposes.