Podcasting: Orality in the Digital Age

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Podcasting Orality in the Digital Age

• Dr. Don Vescio
• Worcester State College
• dvescio_at_worcester.edu

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For Investigation

• What effects do computers and network
  technologies have on the roles we play as readers
  and writers?
• Has the Internet triggered a new age of orality?
• Has the popularity of email, instant messaging,
  blogs, and podcasting changed our understanding
  of narrative and textuality?
• In digital discourse, who are our audiences?

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Discourse (R)Evolution

• Speech
• Unmediated discourse
• Writing
• First-level mediated discourse
• Printing
• Second-level mediated discourse
• Internet
• Computer Mediated Communication Systems (CMC)
• Text-based orality
• Greater independence over time and space than
  paper-based text communication (John December,
  Characteristics of Oral Culture in Discourse on
  the Net)

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Communication and Co-variation
Evolution theory assumed traditionally that the
"natural" environment selects. From this
perspective the natural environment is an
external given for the evolving system, which
itself can exhibit only variation. If selection,
however, feeds information back into the evolving
system, the environment can no longer be
conceptualized as a given, but it must be
considered as another communication system that
exhibits variation. The system/environment
relation is consequently a relation between
communication systems. The communication systems
inform each other by communicating.
Loet Leydesdorff The Evolution of Communications
Systems
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Orality and Literacy

• Primary Orality
• Spoken word
• Chirographic Literacy
• Text-based communication
• Static Web Pages
• Secondary Orality
• Still depends upon written language for some
  development and some levels of operation
• Mitigation of chronological and/or physical
  separation
• Tertiary Orality
• Speech-act independent of sender and receiver
• Multimodal consumption of information

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Postmodern Globalization
Postmodern social theory has taken the spatial
compression of the globe into a global village,
the theme of globalization, as a key area of
cultural change, suggesting as it does that it is
not only history which has been compressed but
geography Mark CurriePostmodern Narrative
Theory
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Postmodern Disaggregation
The peculiar coexistence within literature
departments today of different generational
projects and critical paradigms reflects, in
miniature, the wider disorganization
characteristic of Western societies in recent
decades, a form of disaggregation that renders
pastiche arguably our dominant organizational
mode. Vincent Leitch
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Slavoj Zizek and the Soft Revolution

• Access to key information power and social
  status
• Dominant class is the consumariat
• There is no stable hierarchy as information
  circulates and changes all of the time
• Individuals are nomadic, dividuals,
  constantly reinventing themselves, adopting
  different roles society isa complex, open
  network of networks.
• Tension is between procapitalist netocrats (i.e.,
  Bill Gates) and the underprivileged consumtariat
  until the modes (and ownership) of production
  change.

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Talk Fiction

• Fundamental discourse unit of conversation is not
  words but turns (exchanges) between speaker and
  listener.
• Speakers and listeners are equal participants in
  the speech dynamic.
• Speech is defined not so much by what gets
  produced (the content of the speech) as by
  participants perceptions of what is going on.

Irene Kancandes
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Absent Addressees

• Audience is receiver and participant
• Based on fiction that audience are participants
• Self-conscious perception by readers that they
  are formulating a reply invited by some feature
  of the text
• Readers remain aware that Talking sic departs
  from received reading strategies and that it is
  not to be confused with face-to-face interaction
  

Irene Kancandes
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What is Orality?

• Orality held sway until the rise of widespread
  literacy in the 19th century (Ong)
• Characteristics
• Additive
• Aggregative
• Redundant (copia)
• Conservative
• Situational
• See Ong, Orality and Literacy The Technologizing
  of the Word

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Orality on the Net
The recognition of the visual nature of print and
the lack of 'fully real' interaction on the Net
leads one to consider that the Net is a silent
communicative space. For each posted message, the
words are potentially never said aloud, they are
taken in visually and processed through the
optical areas of the brain, not the auditory. The
cultural space of the Net then is less the
physical elements of hard drives and RAM memory
than in the heads of the individuals who read and
respond to the thousands of messages a day. The
silent readings reinforce individuals' personal
assumptions when reading another's text and
perhaps maintain the plentiful misreadings of one
another. Neil P. Corcoran
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Net Effect

• The production and consumption of information is
  becoming decentralized and shaped into customized
  individual user experiences
• Principles of orality assumes fluid definitions
  of text and reception

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Xanadu and Ted Nelson

• Coined term hypertext in 1965 in a presentation
  at the national conference of the Association for
  Computing Machinery
• There was always something wrong with that
  because you were trying to take these thoughts
  which had a structure, shall we say, a spatial
  structure all their own, and put them into linear
  form. Then the reader had to take this linear
  structure and recompose his or her picture of the
  overall content, once again placed in this
  nonsequential structure.
• Practical Effect mobilization of information
  production and consumption

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Mobility Evolution

• Bulletin Boards and Email
• Web Pages
• Chat/IM (turn taking)
• Blogs (media enables messaging)
• Wikis (open source publishing)
• Moblogs (non-traditional interface devices)
• Podcasting (disconnected consumption of content)

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Web Pages

• Simplifies consumption of online texts
• Offers spatial alternatives to linear narrative
  (hypertext)
• Enables graphical enhancement and augmentation
• Content is portable and fluid
• Marks important transition to oral conventions
  (localized utterances)
• Establishes virtual content containers
  (database-driven sites)

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WSCs SharePoint
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Blogs

• Short for (Web)Logs
• Native internet discourse form.
• Rebecca Blood notes that one of the earliest
  blogs appeared as part of Mosaics Whats New
  Page (7/93-6/96)
• Dave Winer (Scripting News) suggests that the
  original weblog was the first website built by
  Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.
• Term weblog appears to be created by Jorn
  Barger (Robot Wisdom)
• Moblog Mobile-phone blog

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Blog Project Hive
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Blogger.com
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LeffsDiaries Moblog
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The Podcasting Advantage

• Assist auditory learners/non-native speakers
• Multiple review channels
• Provides supplementary content
• Enables rehearsal for instructors
• Leverages device popularity
• Listening to digital audio content wont replace
  reading, listening to live presentations, or the
  multitude of other ways learners take in
  information, but it can augment those methods.

Eva Kaplan-Leiserson
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Podcast Central
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Petersons Podcasts
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Biographical Information
Don Vescio currently is Associate Vice President
of Academic Affairs, Information Technologies at
Worcester State College. Dr. Vescios research
interests include technology and poststructural
critical theory online narratology pedagogical
applications of network communication
environments and composition and discourse
theory. He currently is working on an extended
project that examines the replication of
narratological structures in computer network
topologies.