Week Four Weblog

Common Orality

The suggestion that new media technologies can be of great benefit to certain populations, as suggested by Srinivasan in Indigenous and Ethnic Articulations of New Media, is hopeful. It seems with any new technology there is an undertone of chaos and apocalyptic imagery that emerges at the forefront of debate without enough patience to see how it might be applied to alleviate problems. This tendency exists, perhaps, because it is more difficult to understand the complicated and complex technologies and thereby easier to cast them as tools of control than figuring out a way they might be used as instruments of liberation. If a hammer is used as an analogy for new media technology, the opponents of its use would see it only capable of building a cage while the proponent would see it as the impetus for constructing a bridge.

Understanding how new media technology has transformed literate society provides a crucial insight as to why there are optimistic purveyors of it. Walter Ong claims that “electronic media has brought us into the age of ‘secondary orality.’” Ong continues by saying this new era of communication allows for the experience of a global village and for the individual to be “socially sensitive.” The concept of secondary orality does not suggest a strict return to the oral traditions of non-literate society. Rather, writing and print are still accepted as integral parts of communication. The main similarity, though, lies in its power of “fostering…a communal sense” and generating “a strong group sense.” This may help heal the fact that literate societies “prevent the individual from participating fully in the total cultural tradition to anything like the extent possible in non-literate societies” (Goody &Watt 334). New media technology has also been documented to advance awareness of “the kind of culture-conflict that has been held to produce anomie in oral societies” as a result of the advancing front of high literate society (Goody & Watt, pg. 335). These changes make it possible to receive information about largely ignored cultures in new and memorable ways.

Not only can new media technology expand literate societies’ notion of community, it can also compliment non-literate societies’ innate orality. It can be argued that electronic technology carries with it some inherent element of orality (Ong) because the oral cultures adopted the use of the new electronic media without difficulty (Srinivasan). In the article by Srinivasan, there are several examples of indigenous and ethnically variant groups which use new media technology (cameras, local video programs, the Web) to advance their concerns to powerful government authorities and to maintain connection of diasporas. Specifically, the use of computer-based networks by 19 Native reservations in southern California to create an "imagined community" in the form of an interactive website doubled as an archive, is an example of linking otherwise isolated groups for the purpose of invigorating their sense of culture and society. It was done in a way that put the decisions about how the site should be structured in their control and this resulted in a mutable medium that reflects their own oral traditions. This site is accessible to all who use the Web, but only changed by those who administer or participate in the site.

It is obvious that the foundations for a bridge are being laid by this shared orality to span the gap of the “digital divide.” While on hand we have the literate cultures evolving to secondary orality through their use of electronic media, on the other we have indigenous oral cultures expanding their medium of traditional orality. Meeting on this bridge, perhaps dominant civilizations will find the means to be culturally sensitive to indigenous populations as has never been experienced before. This will create a dialogue that may be of immense benefit to societies everywhere.