The orality is the comunicative expresion of which there are two types:
- The primary orality is the one that referes to those cultures that can just comunicate using oral expresions without writing expresions.
- The secondary orality is expressed by those cultures that use writing expressions. This is becoming the base of the memory.
The hypertext makes reference to the secondary orality which is expressed, like we said above, on the paper. The hypertext is a kind of text that never
ends used in computer applications.
Walter J. Ong, an American Jesuit priest who was a professor of English literature, defines the oral culture as one where people are totally unfamiliar with writing, which is a relatively recent development. Our membership in a society is completely committed to writing and print as ours has made it necessary for him, and others, to describe primary orality in relation to literacy.
The characteristics of thought and expression are:
- Additive rather than subordinative.
- Aggregative rather than analytic.
- Redundant and conservative.
- Conceptualized and then expressed with reference to the human lifeworld.
- Agonistically toned.
- Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced.
- Homeostatic.
- Situational rather than abstract.
He thinks the distance between the originator of the thought and the reciever restructures our consciousness, changing from the primary orality to the development of script.
Ong briefly discusses the emergence, through electronic media such as telephone, radio and television, of what he calls the second orality, which fosters a strong sense of membership in a group and is “essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print“, and the groups produced by second orality are much larger than any produced by primary orality.
Orality facilitates easy storage and retrieval of information, serving as oral storehouses of history.Interaction helps to foreground the elements of an oral narrative and make them easier to remember.
However, some criticize Ong for feeling that literacy is superior to orality. No doubt, the time is right for a sequel to Orality and Literacy, one devoted entirely to the second orality.Apart from those points, the hypermedia is growing more and more in our days. This is the use of the computer to trancend the linear, bounded and fixed qualities of the traditional written text. Unlike the static form of the book, a hypertext can be composed, and read, non-sequentially; it is a variable structure, composed of bloks of text, as George P. Landow and Paul Delany affirm.
By Ana Ruiz, Deiene Zorriketa, Marta Retuerto, Laura Nozal and Begoña de Quintana.
Sources:
- Hypermedia and Literary Studies by George P. Landow and Paul Delany http://books.google.es/books?hl=es&lr=&id=RZqfrGVmHiwC&oi=fnd&pg =PA3&dq=The+written+test+is+the+stable+record+of+thought,+and+to+ achieve+this+stability+the+text+had+to+be+based+on+a+physical+ medium:+clay,+papyrus+or+paper,,+tablet,+scroll+or+book.+But+the+ text+is+more+than+just+the+shadow+or+trace+of+a+thought+already+ shaped%3B+&ots=RAq_Sx8pR6&sig=KOksQggSBGQExSK8Cy5Vj0_NijE
- Review of Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy http://www.engl.niu.edu/wac/ong_rvw.html
- Orality, Literacy, Digitality http://www.tarleton.edu/~lilly/discuss2.htm
- Walter J. Ong on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_J._Ong
