To provide possible models for an investigation into the shift from print literacy to electronic literacy, I will review the comparisons the scholarly world has made concerning the dynamics of oral (pre-literate) consciousness and literate (print-centered) consciousness. This scholarship has posited certain basic differences between the ways of managing knowledge and verbalization in primary oral cultures and literate cultures grounded in the use of writing. Looking at the sharp contrasts drawn between orality and writing, I want to see if the oral/literate dichotomy might provide an analog for an informed examination of what we might call a literate/post-literate dichotomy. I will focus on works by the following:
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. The subject of Ong's work is the difference between orality and literacy. He examines thought and its verbal expression in oral culture and literate thought and expression in terms of their emergence and relation to orality. Ong contends that literacy (particularly alphabetic print literacy) is necessary "for the development not only of science but also history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself" (15). Ong also argues that literacy/writing restructures or transforms human consciousness: "Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing thoughts in oral form" (95). Ong concludes that we are entering a stage he calls secondary orality, a new orality "sustained by telephone, radio, television" (11).
Jack Goody in The Domestication of the Savage Mind and Literacy in Traditional Societies. Goody's works provide invaluable descriptions and analyses of changes in mental and social structures brought about by the use of writing. Particularly important here is his discussions of what he calls "the onset of literacy" in primary oral cultures.
Eric A. Havelock (see bibliography). Havelock shows convincingly how the beginnings of Greek philosophy is linked to the transformation of thought brought about by writing (Preface to Plato). He attributes the rise of Greek analytics and dialectics to introduction of vowels into the Greek alphabet, which allowed a new level of abstract, analytic, visual coding to sound (Origins of Western Literacy).
Particularly important for my investigation is Havelock's latest work: The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. Here Havelock integrates Walter Ong's arguments concerning oral and literate cultures to present a "unified picture of a crisis that occurred in the history of human communication, when Greek orality transformed itself into Greek literacy" (1). Havelock's methodology may provide an analog for my investigation. He points to
- the way in which the transformation took place.
- what it signified at the time.
- what it has since meant for ourselves.
Jacque Derrida, particularly Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference. Derrida provides a counterpoint to the writers above. Derrida, and other post-structuralists such as Roland Barthes (see The Rustle of Language) and Michel Foucault (The Order of Things), work to unravel the oral/literate dichotomies pivotal to the structuralist positions of Ong, Goody, and Havelock. For Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes, our concepts of consciousness or mind are historically contingent upon whatever narratives correspond to the contemporary economic, political, and technological conditions of possibility. Furthermore, these post-structuralists will lay the foundations for later advocates for the shift from the linear, closed space of literacy to the non-linear, open-ended space of electronic literacy.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. The ideas by this philosopher and clinical psychoanalyst will also provide counterpoint to Ong, Havelock, and Goody. They propose an "art of living" that embraces hypertextual and hypermedia processes. For example, they describe one of their essential "principles":
Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic. (xiii)
The primary tropes Deleuze and Guattari use (the rhizome and tree: rhizomatic knowing/being and arborescent knowing/being) may provide me with a way of getting at key differences between a print-literate consciousness and a e-literate consciousness.
I will examine on-line research tools, including discipline-specific hypertextual databases, academic mailing lists or listservs (academic "virtual communities" that converse on specific topics, writers, works), electronic-journals, electronic-texts (such as the Gutenberg Project), bibliographies, sound, video, and image resources. The following directories list peer-reviewed e-journals on the WWW.
The following sites list listservs:
I will examine electronic hypertextual essays as an emerging genre. I will choose representative essays from peer-reviewed e-journals. I will compare the structures, bibliographic coding, and intertextual links of both e-essays and traditional print essays. The purpose here is two-fold. To identify possible characteristics of an emerging genre and to prepare myself for authoring electronic essays using hypertext markup language (for an example of a hypermedia work in progress, see Allegorial Misrecognitons: A Reading of "Closet Land"). A central theoretical concept here is that available forms determine attitudes, that forms are "strategies" for establishing relations to reality, that the primary form of expression in the academy has been the expository essay, and that the form of electronic essays will reshape and reflect the attitudes of the speaker. (See Keith Fort's "Form, Authority, and the Critical Essay")
I plan to monitor on-line (sometimes referred to as
"virtual" or "distance" ) courses and conduct interviews
with students and instructors. These courses are held completely or primarily
over the Internet.
First, by combining an analytical study of current academic uses of the WWW and Internet with current theories of orality/literacy, I hope to derive both pragmatic and theoretical answers to the questions my research poses. I want to provide both descriptive data and possible theoretical interpretations of the data that might point to future developments. I think that to ponder what digital technologies might "do" to us may be the most important question we need to ask right now.
Second is a long-term concern. If we are faced with technologies forming new disciplinary alignments, new structures of thinking, new spaces of educational connection, what do we want from the technologies before the technologies determine what they want from us?
Third, I know the scope of this project is wide. I have already read and studied the writers I mention in the first phase of my research strategy. The next move is to return to them in light of the issue here.