Oral Genealogy is Ephemeral
“Narrators narrate what audiences call for or will tolerate. When the market for a printed book declines, the presses stop rolling but thousands of copies may remain. When the market for an oral genealogy disappears, so does the genealogy itself, utterly.” (66).
This is certainly logical in consideration of the printed word. When the call for a given text declines or subsides, it remains, since it is a tangible form. Conversely, an oral genealogy will vanish if the need and the members to carry it on are gone. However, this is not the case with digital orality, since it takes the narrator’s product, records it (making it essentially tangible), and posts it for the public. Also, with links, metatags, Web crawlers, etc., one can recruit an audience of those that might be interested in the narration.
Therefore, just as a surplus of books remain unsold, un-experienced in the warehouse and on store bookshelves, a published podcast could remain on the originally posted Web site. While the file could be taken down at anytime, there are a few differences here that are starkly different from the physical printed text. The document is produced and singly made available. Without rehashing the well-known differences between publishing for print vs. publishing for the Web, the posted podcast is a file that is made available (free in most, cases) for anyone to download. In this way, if there becomes a need for it again, the original poster can repost the file. If that individual has since lost or deleted the file (theoretically ceasing the oral genealogy), it is quite possible that an individual who has downloaded the file previously could post the speech/file someplace, thus reviving and extending the genealogy of the file. This situation is similar to the oral narrative being passed on to another individual, who can relay it to others. Clearly, there are a many variables to this projection, and it is not a definite assurance that all files will be saved. However, just like the book, the digital orality file becomes a tangible, transferable, storable document with less chance of permanent demise.