Orality and Literacy
If you’ve already read Orality and Literacy, this post might not be useful. This post reviews content from the book that will be relevant to the applications to programming languages later on.
Cognitive Technologies
Consider an oral person with a novel idea. They want to spread this idea to as many people as possible. What are their options? They could either:
- go to far-away places and speak in front of many people, or
- teach it to people who will spread it by word-of-mouth.
There is no way for them to record their thoughts and send them elsewhere; nothing remains of the thought except the traces in the minds of those who heard it. The thought exists as sound and event; it survives only as it is shared. Oral thought is inherently social, contextual, and temporary.
Ong notes that oral cultures rely on formulaic devices (like cliches, narratives, rhymes and rituals) to more reliably transmit ideas. These are cognitive technologies which extend memory and enable transmission. Literate people use different technologies (like line breaks, paragraphs, and mathematical notation) to preserve and organize thought.
What looks like dull or onerous repetition in the oral arts (Homeric hexameter, oral histories, mnemonic formulas) is better interpreted as technology applicable to a particular medium of communication rather than evidence of intellectual inferiority. A scribe might use dark ink on sturdy paper to ensure their ideas are accurately transmitted to someone in another country. So too do oral artists leverage the technology at their disposal to communicate as clearly as possible. Translation is difficult; tools useful in one medium may be useless, strange, or redundant in another.
The Medium Restructures Consciousness
Central to Ong’s thesis is that the means of communication change cognition. Before applying Ong’s analysis to programming languages, we need to understand how orality and literacy structure cognition differently.
Ong avoided using the term “medium” because it encourages readers to consider communication to work like this:
- Some one has a thought they would like to communicate.
- They encode that thought into a little nugget capable of being transmitted across a medium (like speech or literature).
- They transmit that nugget to another person, who
- decodes the nugget and downloads the thought into their brain.
Thinking of a ‘medium’ of communication or of ‘media’ of communication suggests that communication is a pipeline transfer of units of material called ‘information’ from one place to another… This model obviously has something to do with human communication, but, on close inspection, very little, and it distorts the act of communication beyond recognition.
In real human communication, the sender has to be not only in the sender position but also in the receiver position before he or she can send anything.
Communication can be something you do to someone else, and it can fundamentally act on the sender, not just the receiver. When we speak or write, it does not just transfer parcels of information to another person, but it fundamentally changes us. Writing enables entirely new ways of thinking. There was no such thing as a “list” in primarily oral cultures, nor was there the concept of “looking something up.” Where could anything be “looked up?” The closest conceptual match would be asking your wisest elder.
An oral person’s knowledge is organized by narrative. It is not possible to represent or maintain strict hierarchies or higher-level abstractions in narrative. Orality requires immediate social and physical context, and is therefor more socially and communally grounded.
Literacy enables greater individualism and precision. Authors often attempt context-independence such that their work does not rely too much on the audience’s context. This enables precise, systematic reasoning divorced from immediate circumstances. Writing encourages thinking of works as self-contained units with clear beginning, middle, and end.
Next, we’ll build on these ideas and apply them to programming languages.