"Well I HEARD..." a Study on Secondary Orality

“Secondary Orality”

The second coming of an oral culture.

The predecessor to the first oral cultures.

The residue of the human’s innate tendency to be a part of an oral culture.

When Ong writes,

“This new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, it’s fostering of a communal sense, it’s concentration on the present moment, even its use of formulas.”(Ong 55)

I immediately think of Twitter.

Participatory mystique- the reply button on twitter, the retweet button even. The ability to type out “hello” and know someone somewhere will reply “hello” back instantaneously as if they heard you yell the greeting from across the street.

Communal Sense- your followers and the people you follow on twitter become your community. As soon as you hit the follow button you are literally following that person everywhere, to the store, to the mall, to the free clinic. You are now privy to every detail that they chose to tell you about.

Concentration on the Present- trending topics. These change by the hour, minute, second. In the time it takes to type out a trending topic it is already accounted for and noted. The same as if you were to speak aloud, and some had heard it. This past summer, I learned first about every big scandal or disaster through twitter’s #trending topics. It’s a real time ticker that lists the things that people are talking/tweeting about right at that very second.

Formula-no tweet shall exceed 140 characters. Whatever you have to tweet you have to make it quick and memorable or else no one will read it. Tweets appear on your timeline within seconds of being typed. If you follow 200 people, you’re reading at least 200 tweets a day, if the tweet doesn't capture your attention, more than likely it gets overlooked. Just like in the primary oral culture, where if a story was too long or unmemorable it was forgotten.

These are only some of the qualities of an oral culture that literate society has found to be preferable. The main other would probably be Ong’s theory that man is the navel of the universe.

“The centering action of sound (the field of sound is not spread out before me but all around me) affects man’s sense of the cosmos. For oral culture, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at the center.”(Ong 54)

I take this to mean the act of hearing is extremely personal. When you hear a sound, it literally feels like its entering you. A rousing sermon, music, crying, these sounds pull emotion out of man, unlike writing which can only come slightly close. If you can feel sound all around you, it can sometimes feel as if you are engulfed in sound and as if that sound was solely made for you. Similar to the way monotheistic religions clung to Aristotle’s belief that animal life only existed for man’s sake, this hearing of sound/ man is the navel of the world theory reminds me of something else.

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Literate culture loves to belief the world was made just for us. The audacity to think that sound stops being producing because no person is around to hear it brings me back to the oral cultures belief that “the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at the center”. Apparently, oral culture was only slightly less self centered than literate culture is.

Ong,Walter "Orality, Literacy and Modern Media", Communication in History Sixth Edition 2011