Today concludes my ten part series on my exploration into Walter Ong’s classifications of orality and how I see them relating to an emerging social media language. The posts can be read as individual posts or as a series starting on November 1st. For now I’ve also put them all into a category called Orality.
As Walter J. Ong tells us in his book Orality and Literacy,”oral societies live very much in the present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance.” This is as true now as it was in an oral tradition. The format of blogging is set up to push stories down the webpage visually as new stories are published. These stories are archived but in a visual hierarchy they are seen as lesser to more recent posts. As aggregator sites collect stories they often automatically refresh and cull in more recent stories thus “sloughing off” the older stories. The algorithim of Digg.com, one of the more popular story aggregators is such that stories that are ‘digged’ by readers or in other words rated highly are shown more on the landing page, but the time of publication is also factored in to show highest rated and most recent. There are social booking sites such as del.icio.us that serve as online tools for bookmarking or remembering stories however the greatest value of these sites is for sharing of stories that are important to the individual. For example, del.icio.us/radarddb tells my audience stories that are important to me at my workplace, but always displayed in chronological order with the visual hierarchy being that of most recent at the top. In a social media landscape that perpetuates new stories being published every second, stories that are not memorable are in the past and likely to be forgotten.
