{"id":72,"date":"2017-07-18T09:16:53","date_gmt":"2017-07-18T16:16:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/webspace.royalroads.ca\/jhodson\/?p=72"},"modified":"2017-11-28T11:25:31","modified_gmt":"2017-11-28T19:25:31","slug":"back-to-the-future-history-in-oral-literate-and-digital-forms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webspace.royalroads.ca\/jhodson\/back-to-the-future-history-in-oral-literate-and-digital-forms\/","title":{"rendered":"Back to the Future? History in oral, literate and digital forms"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"CaveCave paintings, Magura Caves by MarleBrlzrd on Flikr: farm3.static.flickr.com\/2789\/4387489763_6fbbd42824_o.jpg<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Fake News on The Rise<\/h4>\n

According to the Daily Mail, a recent study out of Oxford University has reported that fake news is on the rise around the world<\/a>. The study found that automated bots play an outsized role in spreading fake news, and are often employed as a form of astroturfing<\/a> or to deliberately spread propaganda. Reflecting on this phenomenon, and also the ways that online propaganda played a role in the most recent US election, I can’t help but draw upon Walter Ong’s foundational work, Orality and Literacy: Technologizing the Word. <\/em>Though the text was written prior to the development of Facebook and Twitter, re-reading this book in light of recent events has lent some weight for me on ideas of orality, literacy, and the new world of electronic secondary orality, particularly as these cultures relate to how people make sense of history, and how we determine the nature of truth. At the same time, I also think that recent events challenge Ong’s original ideas about what secondary orality looks like, and thus I’d like to propose a slightly new definition in light of new digital trends and the worrying disruption of the archive. I’ll begin to discuss these ideas here, and may also return to them later, as these topics are big ones.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Orality to Print to Digital: Committing words to space and then releasing them?<\/h4>\n

According to Ong, Print committed words to space, taking something that was ephemeral and making it permanent, and searchable – enabling the archive. This was important for the development of logic, science and law, as it allowed previous knowledge to be built upon in great detail. Previous to print, people only knew what they “could recall” which means that there were limits to the complexities of scholarly legal and political action. With electronic communication, Ong suggests that words are still committed to space, and while this is still currently the case, with this blog being one example, I’m not sure it’s as strong an argument now as it was in 2003. In fact, I think words are beginning to lose their connection to space and are once again becoming more ephemeral. Think, for example of a Twitter timeline. You may see a tweet once, and never be able to find it again. Similarly, once a platform goes out of business (like Google Reader<\/a>, or more recently SoundCloud<\/a>), all the media hosted there stand to be lost forever. Despite the Internet Archive Project<\/a>, we still have no real standard for archiving online content, particularly walled-garden style social media content, even though we have created it ourselves. This is one reason why I think we have to consider that digital text is more ephemeral than print, and also why we may need to update ideas of secondary orality to accommodate the ephemerality of the histories we are currently creating online.<\/p>\n

“Ok Google”: Talking to the Internet<\/h4>\n

Another reason that we cannot count on the permanence of text in a new digital culture has to do with emerging ways that we access online information. Amazon, Google and Apple are all beginning to put more energy and marketing money behind voice recognition interfaces such as Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Siri. These devices do retrieve information in a way that seems, at first, to be more akin to print culture and the archive than it does to oral culture, but it also brings our interaction with language and information back to a more ephemeral form. As soon as we speak, the word is gone, and we’re waiting for a response from our device. Furthermore, we do not control the algorithms that determine what information is delivered to us via these devices, and from what we know of how online algorithmic filtering of information currently occurs, we can see that these devices are likely to deliver us information that already fits within or supports our already existing points of view. Unlike speaking with an interlocuter in a traditional oral culture, we cannot have a conversation with these devices about the quality of information being delivered nor can we at present ask for information that contradicts our beliefs. Because of this, our interactions here may not put us in a space where we are using history as a point to build logic, law or philosophy, but rather, if we follow the logic of primary orality to literacy to secondary orality, could lead us to a sort of a-historical new space. One not of “knowing what you can recall” but rather one of recalling only what you (already) know.<\/p>\n

Fake News aND the End of History<\/h4>\n

Which brings me back to the study about the rise of fake news. Without putting the blame on technology only, because we all know that technologies are built by human beings under specific social, cultural and economic circumstances, I would suggest that fake news is a particular challenge of secondary orality. In an environment of declining language permanence, history and logical thought may also experience declining importance for people. Instead we can look to new mythologies and personalities who step into fill the void. This too may be reflected in the recent “ageless<\/a>” trend, and the growing popularity of pseudo-scientific products and claims on both left and right leaning websites alike.<\/a> There are governments and other organizations that profit by spreading fake news, but they are likely simply taking advantage in a particular confluence of socio-cultural and technological developments that make their efforts possible. What this means overall is that a technological solution such as a fake news button, or more algorithmic filtering is not really going to be an effective solution to this issue. The problem, at its heart is much bigger. Importantly, as we rush to introduce new technologies into our homes, and interact with them in new ways (voice activated or otherwise), we must remember that we do not know what the long term effects may be on ourselves, our families and our communities. This is not to say that we shouldn’t use them, but rather that we should be cautious and critical when we do so. I for one, keep Siri turned off on my phone; at least for now, I’d rather she didn’t listen in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cave paintings, Magura Caves by MarleBrlzrd on Flikr: farm3.static.flickr.com\/2789\/4387489763_6fbbd42824_o.jpg Fake News on The Rise According to the Daily Mail, a recent study out of Oxford University has reported that fake news is on the rise around the world. The study found that automated bots play an outsized role in spreading fake news, and are often […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":184,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webspace.royalroads.ca\/jhodson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webspace.royalroads.ca\/jhodson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webspace.royalroads.ca\/jhodson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webspace.royalroads.ca\/jhodson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/184"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webspace.royalroads.ca\/jhodson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/webspace.royalroads.ca\/jhodson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183,"href":"https:\/\/webspace.royalroads.ca\/jhodson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions\/183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webspace.royalroads.ca\/jhodson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webspace.royalroads.ca\/jhodson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webspace.royalroads.ca\/jhodson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}