In science, the observer effect refers to changes that the act of observing has on the phenomenon being observed. For example: observing an electron will change its path because the observing light or radiation contains enough energy to disturb it.

In quantum mechanics, if the outcome of an event has not been observed, it exists in a state of superposition, which is being in all possible states at once. The most famous example is the thought experiment Schrodinger’s cat, in which the cat is neither alive nor dead until observed until that time, the cat is both alive and dead (technically half-alive and half-dead in probability terms).

Oracy

Review and Synopsis of Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy: Technologizing the Word"
June 29th, 2008, 4:23 pm by Kevin Cassell

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Review of Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.

The Transition from Orate to Literate Cultures

About 3,500 years ago human beings around the world began to organize themselves into social systems that relied heavily on technological ingenuity. Historians and anthropologists have described this time period as a series of various "shifts," from the "magical" to the "scientific," or from the "pre-logical" to the "rational," even from the "savage" to the "domesticated." These "shifts," Walter Ong argues in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, may be best understood as transitions from oral cultures to literate ones. Because of the inherent chirographic and typographic bias of their text-based disciplines, in which significance is associated with what is seen and not heard, written and not spoken, historians and anthropologists have been slow to recognize that concomitant with all these cultural "shifts" is the gradual usurpation of oral modes of communication by the "technology" of writing.

In fact, the word "text" (derived from a word meaning "to weave") is actually more compatible with oral utterance than with literature (which derives from the word for alphabetic letters, literae). Oral discourse is often thought of in terms of weaving or stitching. The Greek word rhapsoidein (rhapsodize) means "to stitch songs together." (p. 13) Borrowing heavily from each other, poets in primary oral cultures recalled and repeated formulas of popular rhythmic patterns and themes to rhapsodize songs. The poet(s?) Homer, like all oral poets whose songs and storytelling gave birth to literature, had an "abundant repertoire of epithets diversified enough for any metrical exigency that might arise as he stitched his story together." (21)

The clichéd elements, consistent characterization, and impeccable structure of the Iliad and Odyssey are what gave many the impression that they were the creations of a single author. But as Milman Parry pointed out in a 1928 dissertation on the subject, the "literary" style of both epics suggest an economy enforced by oral methods of composition. Formulaic thought patterns are essential for wisdom and effective administration in oral cultures. Oral rhyme schemes help commit ideas to memory. The force of these poems lies in their residual orality (24).

Writing and Print

What Ong calls the technology of writing transformed human consciousness. Not only did it allow for the representation of words as signs, it gave a linear shape to thought and provided a critical framework within which to think analytically. He concurs with Eric A. Havelock's position that the beginnings of Greek philosophy were bound to the restructuring of thought brought about by writing. Plato's exclusion of poets from his Republic displays a rejection of the old, warm, mobile, personally interactive lifeworld of oral culture "in favor of keen analysis and dissection of the world and of thought itself made possible by the interiorization of the Greek alphabet." Plato's term "idea" (eidos, form or model) is, like writing, visually based and derives from the same root as the Latin "video," which means "to see" (80). His philosopher-kings were "seers" more than speakers.

From its genesis, the technology of writing helped stratify societies and was associated with a privileged elite. The earliest writing systems--Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics--were the property of priests. Ong argues that writing, by abstractly separating the knower from the known, "is capable of interiorizing the self against whom the objective world is set." Is it any wonder that "the great introspective religious traditions"--Hinduism, Judeo-Christianity, Islam--"are text-based?" (105). The literate segments of populations, those who could read and interpret "The Word," assumed an occult power that elevated their status and helped to disseminate the texts upon which that power was based.

While democratizing what was once exclusively the property of privileged classes, the invention of the printing press in 1436 furthered writing's distance from the sound-world to the world of visual space. But this is a totalizing space: "Control of position is everything in print," Ong argues. ""We are impressed by its tidiness and inevitability: perfectly regular lines, justification, symmetrical margins" (122). Print (or typography), by commodifying writing, created a sense of the private property of words. The uncited borrowing of another's words that was the stuff of communal oral cultures became a sin called "plagiarism." Copyright laws, first introduced in London in 1557, are the modern world's response to the threat of intellectual theft.

What Ong calls "the interiorization of print" allows for an emphasis on introspection. Hence, the flat characters of oral cultures are replaced by the round characters worshipped by literate ones. Ong suggests that "the development of modern depth psychology parallels the development of the character in drama and the novel, both depending on the inward turning of the psyche produced by writing and intensified by print" (154-5). In the 20th century especially, the "literary" novel's association with the genre of realism was widely perceived as natural; novels that were not "realistic" were relegated to the ranks of science fiction, fantasy, and other popular genres.

Why not an Orate Education?

While not central to the book, Ong's study has pedagogical implications. Because literacy standards remain the benchmark for assessing student performance, it is possible for remarkably gifted but "orate" students to fall to the wayside. And yet, orality has not been usurped by literacy completely and still plays an important role in high-tech societies where success is often associated with vocal and communicative savvy. Clearly, a high premium is placed on the ability to express oneself orally in Western culture. School systems, however, continue to operate on the assumption that facility with skills essential to writing and reading (and, hence, "critical thinking") are the highest achievements of education. Ong's study warrants a critical examination of such assumptions.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. (New Accent Series, Terrence Hawkes, ed.) New York: Routledge, 1982.

Visual Space Is Not Continuous

...that is perhaps another way of coming to this medium in a message thing.

In visual space, we think of things as continuous and connected.

There is no connection in auditory space or tactile space. To the sense of touch, there are no connections. There are only resonances, beats, rhythms, closures, and to smell to all (the) other senses, kinetic movement and so on, there is no continuity and no connection only discontinuity.

This idea of the visual man, the Euclidean man, that space is continuous and uniformly connected does not apply in the electronic age to any of the senses except sight and under electronic condition, even the visual has lost that continuous character.

Under special television conditions, it becomes once more a mosaic, a collage of resonant dots, spots.

If Time Was Infinite and Space Was Finite

Global Village Theatre

"Virtually all people live by what I think of as a 'fiction-absolute,'" Wolfe writes. "Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world -- so ordained by some almighty force -- would make not that individual but his group... the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles."

McLuhan had established decades ago the consequences of TV as a new medium that would return society to its tribal ways, pushing the literate man back to an ‚ Acoustic‚ world where oral tradition is the preferred mechanism for cultural transfer. Acoustic‚ was mostly used as a metaphor for‚ many things happening at once‚ I believe that his position is even more accurate today to describe the transition from TV to a more fluid medium.


However, for a new generation of viewers, viewing is not enough. Participation is a must. The Lonelygirl15 phenomenon provides a preview of the type of interactivity that the audience is demanding. Unscheduled snippets of action, very short, cuasi-serialized but easily interchangeable, many different levels of stories that may appeal to different participants, alternate channels to get involved whether providing comments or producing additional snippets of content and endless hooks to plug-in their own ideas into the story. In this new medium there are no rules on how to consume the message, which distorts the message itself and provides creative license to the audience. Assuming there are smart producers listening to all the feedback, the evolution of such a venture is largely based on what the audience wants.


Hidden connection. An acoustic medium requires the user to consume it partially and obtain the full picture by means of active participation in it. Interpretation is not only good, it is encouraged as it makes the discussion more interesting. By presenting vignettes of reality apparently disconnected one from the other we can convey the illusion of reality as long as there is space for that active participation that compliments the act of viewing them. The net effect should be more powerful than having a single long feature narrating our story linearly.

It's been a quarter century since Marshall McLuhan entered the popular culture pantheon inhabited by the likes of Einstein and Freud, but his work continues to fascinate and infuriate the scholarly world. No wonder - it explores a reality that had only partially come into view at the time of McLuhan's death in 1980. McLuhan referred to this as "acoustic space." In today's parlance, it is cyberspace.

According to Phillip Marchand, McLuhan first broached this concept in 1954 with the shocking point that what we consider normal or natural visual space is actually a technological artifact, a result of perceptual habits created by seeing through a phonetic alphabet. Acoustic space, in contrast, held sway before the alphabet - it brooks no boundaries and happens all at once - and returns via electronic media. Thus we enter McLuhan's celebrated "global village" and "laws of media" or "tetrads," which suggest that every technology (1) amplifies part of our culture, (2) obsolesces aspects previously amplified, (3) retrieves elements previously obsolesced, and (4) eventually reverses or "flips" into something else entirely. So TV intensifies the audio-visual; co- opts acoustic-only radio; recovers pictures previously purged in radio's derogation of print; and reverses into holography, interactive television, computers - take your pick. Picking computers, Bruce Powers tells us they accelerate calculations to the speed of light, erode mechanical sequences, reclaim numerical power, and reverse into simultaneous pattern recognition.

Eric McLuhan says they increase calculation and retrieval speeds, erase approximation and the present, recall total recall, and reverse into bureaucratic anarchy. Eric McLuhan's approach is the more stimulating and difficult to immediately comprehend. Powers deserves praise for making McLuhan more palatable to the poetry-impaired. The Letters show that McLuhan minded being misunderstood. "You have not studied Joyce or Baudelaire yet," he lectures a flattering author, "or you would have no problem understanding my procedure. I have no theories." This reminded me of a message from Marshall on my answering machine: "I've been reading through your [doctoral] dissertation, and you misrepresent me...." (I'd called him a philosopher.)

Given the acoustic/cyberspatial nature of McLuhan's thinking and writing, why bother with these books? Why squeeze the all-at-once into the fixed sequential confines of even the most liberated hardcopy? Why not wait for the hypertexts that will allow readers, coming upon McLuhan's mention of speed in a tetrad, to leap to 50 other places where speed resides? While we do wait, these books provide insight and pleasure to those of us on the cusp of the world of letters that was and the one that will be. Most of these worthy titles are now out of print, so check your library. -P.Levinson