"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 consi...
Continue reading ..."Oral societies must invest great energy in saying over and over again what has been learned arduously over the ages. This need establishes highly traditionalist or conservative set of mind that with good reason inhibits intellectual experimentation. ... By storing knowledge outside the mind, writin...
Continue reading ...Continuing the conversation regarding redundancy or repetition (from 11.21.07), this concept can be seen as a large difference in the digital orality and new media psyche, quite separate from the writing psyche. "Since redundancy characterizes oral thought and speech, it is in a profound sense mor...
Continue reading ...In a primarily oral culture, there is no way to record and recall a speech or oral performance. As Ong, Heim, and others have detailed, this is the reasoning for the structured, rhythmic nature of the oral epic. It was just not possible for the human mind to organize and remember a detailed, complex...
Continue reading ...“Thought requires some sort of continuity. Writing establishes in the text a 'line' of continuity outside the mind. If distraction confuses or obliterates from the mind the context out of which emerges the material I am now reading, the context can be retrieved by glancing back over the text selec...
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