Orality vs. LiteracyOrality: Thought and verbal expression in

societies where the technologies of literacy are unfamiliar.

Literacy: The skills of reading and writing, the ability to think critically about the

written word.

Orality• Oral cultures are untouched by writing, have

no knowledge of it.• To ‘look up something’ is an empty phrase.• Language is a mode of action, an event.• Words have great power by the inflection of

sound. (Tonevolume)

Orality

• Think memorable thoughts.• To solve the problem of retaining and retrieving

articulated thought, thinking must be done in mnemonic patterns.

• Highly rhythmic-->Rhythm aids recall.Key note: All expression and all thought is to a degree formulaic, every word and every concept conveyed in a word is a kind of formula.

Orality

• Redundancy, repetition, fluency, fulsomeness, and volubility are all important in oral culture.

• Knowledge that is not repeated aloud will soon disappear. Oral societies must retell important stories/information so they continue to remain relevant. Narrators through the ages have been known to introduce new elements to old stories.

• What are some examples?

Orality• Oral societies live in the present.• The meaning of each word is controlled by the real life, the

here and now.• Vocal expression was learned by observation and practice.• Oral cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational

modes of reference. They are not concerned with the abstract.

• Gestures, vocal inflections, and facial expressions are important tools for people of oral cultures.

Examples

Literacy

• The skills of reading and writing• 3 facts about literacy: recency, lack of evidence,

and restricted nature.• The earliest systems were rooted in the need to

remember and identify an object or a being.• There was the discovery that words could be

expressed in written symbols and that better methods of human intercourse would result.

Literacy-Phoneticization

• The most important single step in the history of writing and preliteracy.

• Arose from the need to express words and sounds that could not be indicated by pictures or their combination.

• The correspondence of signs with words and meanings, and of signs with syllabic values.

(signs and the direction, shape, lines of script)

• The first to allow a truly useful and popular literacy based in readership was….???

The Greek Alphabet• The developing modern alphabet had to meet a number of

social and intellectual conditions.• It had to cover a large number of linguistic sounds and a

sufficient number of characters of visible shape, and trigger a readers memory of distinctive sounds.

• The number of signs and shapes had to be limited to avoid overburdening one’s memory.

• The alphabet created the possibility and potential for development and change.

• This idea eventually moved on to Rome where they took on Greek models.

Final thoughts: Communication, Cultural and Media Studies

• Plato proposed that humans don’t perceive truth directly, but only in an indirect, distorted image. Humans cannot see themselves as they are.

• Images are opposed to reality, adjacent with illusion.

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