CONTEMPORARY ORAL CULTURE -- HUH?

Contemporary indigenous oral culture is never discussed because it is assumed that modern educated people are all literate.  When I first came to Browning in the Sixties, many old white ranchers were avid readers, which supported the book industry's Western and historical genres, as well as some WWII books.  There was no television to speak of.  Transistor radios were new, but radio was an important social force.

By now oral culture among some contemporary people is primary.  Not all those iPods are devoted to music.  Many people run the radio in the background, possibly broadcast from satellites, all the day while they do their work.  Because so many commute so much, they also depend on sound while they drive or ride.

But the factor of digitization, a more focused delivery which can be either oral or print, can carry a new mode which is video.  It plays into our preference for eyesight over hearing and combines them into a simulation of reality that is very powerful.  Our education system is not up to the task of teaching people how to handle this information, how to critique it both for "truth" and for skill.  For many people, we can hardly teach reading print.  Assuming we can get them to the school house.

I've never seen figures correlating social class or education level or occupation with the preference of oral communication over written communication.  It seems likely from daily experience that working class people prefer and more easily use oral material.  This means that their attention goes in and out, depending on what they're doing and the intensity of the messages.  But commuters, who are likely to be working on print-focused material like contracts or directions or meeting notes, incomes are higher.  People are more likely to be living in the suburbs, so lives tend to be split between the auditory material of a commute and print delivery at work, maybe on computer screens.  Something similar may happen when contrasting those who simply watch television and those who actively interact with video via a computer, as in games.

It seems to me, though again I have no studies to quote, that many women relate to published novels, which they read so constantly and efficiently that they may consume a book a day, which means access to a library unless a person has a lot of money and space for the print objects.  Maybe they are repeating their earlier family-making lives in the same way that old ranchers stay in the familiar framework of Westerns.  Is that a valid idea?  Someone should take a look.

Here's another wild idea, that youngsters in their fondness for altered consciousness and fantasy, are responding to the alternative reality of video, images that are impossible in real life.  Both their acceptance of crazy ideas and their yearning for control relate to this.  How this plays out in elections will be unpredictable.  Some will have access to major money as their parents die of old age. A sixteen-year-old girl whose consciousness is slightly different is able to cross the ocean in a solar and wind-driven sailboat, highly monitored and able to report en route, then able to cross the continent and enter many systems of political resistance and innovation to marshall huge crowds. That takes a lot of money.  But we don't know for sure where it comes from.

Video presents major changes in communication.  One is that people can no longer escape from what they said or did in the past, nor can they get away with simply repeating old buzz words.  Another is that we can alter reality so that giant cats sit on battleships and people look like they are murdering or dancing or saying things they never said.  Another is that now we see people throughout their lifetimes, the arc of their young -- even baby-age -- selves through careers in which they bloom, are fruitful, then shrivel and die.  Our consciousness of what time and life-time are has become urgent.

My judgement is impaired in this whole reflection because of where my allegiances lie.  I am on the side of confronted climate change, dominated by print in my creative life, still susceptible to the unreliable notion that being a "best-seller" means anything but promotion.  It's isolating.  The "friend" who said my blogging was simply an obsession of no importance stabbed me right in my key ego assumption, which is that I'm participating in a worldwide conversation about human existence, even all lifeforms.  As a former student he would say that his inability to even read my writing is due to my failure to properly educate him, and maybe it is.

None of my relatives, even the ones who read all the time, will read my blog.  Behind the obvious distinctions between print, voice, and video are cultural distinctions.  I disturb them.  We look for what confirms us, no matter what the media.  The guy out on his combine going up and down the rows and listening to the stock market reports does not want to hear about ballet.  At the grocery store someone told me proudly they had no taste for intellectual stuff, as though it were a corruption, an indulgence.  A relative told me they had no time for such self-indulgence as my blog.

I thought I might investigate pod-casting -- go oral.  At present I don't understand the phrase "available wherever you get your podcasts."  It seems to imply that pod-casting is still channeling the way television did in the beginning.  I want to post audible thinking alongside my print.  I'm not willing to go so far as video because of lack of technical skill, though I much admire the products of the young men I used to connect to.  So much of public communication is controlled by economics, which is access and equipment.

Cyber-communication is not guaranteed.  Looming in the possible future, is the potential failure of the satellite network crucial to digitizing and transmitting media, and -- more "earthly" -- the failure of our electrical grid.  I don't have the resources for solar panels or generators so that I can be "stand alone."  Even for those who have backup, it would be a loss of those who can receive.  I carry always the mental picture of a rice planter up to her knees in water while she pushes sprouts into the mud, listening to radio, thanks to batteries.  On the one hand, such a leap into a new world and on the other hand, the fragility.  Maybe that's what human means.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaHcOs7mhfU