The ability to communicate verbally, with eloquence and precision, is an ability that I would love to have been born with. Instead, it is a skill that I struggle to practice with any sort of competence. In classes, most of my thoughts on the material are communicated through my writing. Discussion posts, reflections, and papers make sure of this. I even pride myself on my typing speed. Words seem to appear on the screen before I consciously think them. And yet, when asked to verbalize the thoughts that appear so effortlessly on the screen, I tend to freeze and, um, hesitate. My speech is riddled with pauses that, according to Ong, actually hinder my rhetorical process. Ong writes, "In oral delivery, though a pause may be effective, hesitation is always disabling. Hence is it better to repeat something, artfully if possible, rather than simply to stop speaking while fishing for the next idea," (40).
In this post, I am attempting to write in stream of consciousness style. I am approaching this post with little to no plan of what I will say, instead I am letting the words flow onto the page without hesitation, or at least an excessive amount of hesitation. Even now, I see grammar mistakes and syntax in my peripheral and the temptation to stop my thought process and correct what I have written is almost overwhelming. In his writing, Ong mentions that in an oral culture, the ability to pause and go back in nonexistent. This concept is one I find almost impossible to understand. It is so common for me to let my mind wander and explore tangents while I read, that I almost always read things twice. I've always taken this for granted. Letting my thoughts evolve with the reading, and then returning to the text with more context and my own perspective is a process that I value. This is partly why I dislike most audiobooks and lectures without an outline. And yet, the more I think about this process, which I have always considered to be idiosyncratic and somewhat peculiar, the more common it seems.
Our modern culture is obsessed with instant gratification. Technology has allowed for access to knowledge instantaneously. The term "Google" is no longer just a noun that represents a search engine, but a verb. There are multiple times in a week, and probably in a day, in which I, or someone around me, uses the phrase "We should Google that," or at least something in that vein. And even when that Googling is taking place, the absorption of knowledge is brief. It is reading part of a Wikipedia entry, or perhaps just the dictionary definition of a term. Articles are written to be engaging, but brief and to the point. And the discussion surrounding these articles are written in short responses. It is not often that I am able to read a somewhat obscure article and then have an in-depth conversation about it with another individual. The more technology infiltrates everyday life, the more dependent our culture becomes on the written word. Simple communication is no longer spoken, it is texted, posted, emailed, expressed with an emoji. Verbally speaking ideas and thoughts is losing value in this postmodern culture.
Our postmodern culture is highly skeptical of orality because of the inherent flaws in oral culture. Oral culture is flawed because the human mind is flawed. Science has shown that memories cannot always be trusted. In court, eye-witness accounts are always questioned because we know that our memories cannot be trusted. But writing is concrete. It is not ephemeral. It has a permanence that the spoken word does not have. As Ong states, "sound exists only when it is going out of existence. It is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sense as evanescent," (32). Writing is permanent, it is concrete, and it can be trusted. It will not change over time, it is not subject to moods and emotions and outside influences.
While this postmodern society is obsessed with skepticism and questioning everything around us, I believe that our culture is losing something with the devaluation of oral tradition. Oral tradition has been an integral part of humanity since the beginning. While it is true that modern society would be impossible without writing, it is very possible that we are relying too much on this technology.
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