In the age of scientific achievements and great man made achievements, funny
how we took simple means of communication between two people into connecting
the world. This only shows how that even in the grandest scheme of things,
communication is the one thing constant that will always be relevant and has
room for improvement. But before these man-made wonders are achieved, before we
relied heavily on technology to communicate there were simpler times where
there is oral and literacy culture.
Orality came before literacy by a long shot. Back then,
people had no means of recording the knowledge they attain. To compensate for such,
they created chants, epics, stories and songs of a tribe in order to retain the
information they want. Another thing about orality is that it had empathetic
values and felt closer and personal as every person speaking has an immediate
reaction or response. It was not also the shackles of constraint that literacy cultures,
since dictionaries, thesaurus and other references are not available in an oral
culture therefore there few disagreements regarding semantics, grammar and
political correctness. Most of the time, every matter of discussion and every
meaning of the word are agreed upon the two who are speaking at that very
moment. One last thing that distinguishes orality from literacy is that orality
lives solely on the present while literacy seeks to connect the past to the
present whilst predicting the future.
Literacy, as mentioned earlier, came way after orality. The
latter was unstructured and based solely on understandings of the speaker and receiver
while literacy had a formal style and structured as it was bind in written
rules that most literate then, agreed upon. Since the structured form was
introduced, it became distant from the emotions that orality has. It became a
basis of intelligence while failing to appeal to emotions. Sure, there are
letters expressing love and gratitude but one cannot deny that the being said
in person “I love you” beats a written note everyday. The rules of grammar and
punctuation also have been complicated for some that they fail to convey the
proper message they wish to say in the first place, focusing in the structure rather
than message. These may be a few repercussions but there is no denying how literacy
shaped the world of today; from writing the history to writing further bodies
of language. Everything we can think of can be written to down to further
expand for the future generations. The possibilities and potentials of this
world have grown limitless. Imagine if
we did not learn to write, then all the marvels of the world would cease to
exist.
These two forms of medium coexist in ways that they
cannot be separated. Both had its flaws and strengths but there is no denying
how one needs the other. Some ideas spoken orally are written down for further
discussions. Orality came first and started communication but it was expanded
and enriched by literacy. Once we learned how to write, all those dispensable
things that we said that are gone with the wind are now retained. There was thrive
for further knowledge, cultures were preserved better, and laws were made
unitary. Orality should not be seen as primitive rather than a gateway for
better seeking of knowledge as it guides the literacy in which most of us have
today.
Intersubjectivity
if media was also given attention by Walter Ong. To put simply, intersubjectivity
is the agreement between the speaker and receiver among the definitions and
meanings of the words they are using while conversing. Going back to Ong, he
pertains that communication should work as a two-way street as one would speak
or write expecting an immediate response. Media does not have this privilege,
as it delivers the message to receiver which does not have immediate or rather,
certain response. It simply gives out the message it wished to convey without
regarding the words, feelings and other things that may affect some audience. Feedback is essential in a close conversation
and this is what the media lacks despite having a larger scope of audience.
Media model of communication shows that there is no
definite audience. It became a one way type of communication as literacy seeks
to be factual and while informational speeches of oral are performance based. In
a nutshell, media model of communication seeks an audience for spreading information
may it be oral or written but it does not have the feedback mechanism.
References:
Benjamin, J. (1990). Recognition and destruction: An outline of intersubjectivity. Psychoanalytic psychology, 7(suppl), 33–47. (Reprinted in 1999 in S. A. Mitchell & L. Aron (Eds.), Relational psychoanalysis: The emergence of a tradition (pp. 181–210). Hillsdale: The Analytic Press).
https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept12/2012/09/30/1150/
http://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/ong-on-the-differences-between-orality-and-literacy
https://comm10sec14.wordpress.com/page/1/
