Warning: Podsafe Content
A brief musing on technology, mediation, and the proper pronunciation of "Ong." Just kidding... although I did wonder that. My podcast attempts to place writing within Baron's stages of technological invention & acceptance, as a method of examining the extent of technological mediation on our cognitive perception. I describe the contrast between creative and conservative thresholds within these stages as sites of conflict that define individual preferences towards technology use, relating this to Alexander and Rheingold. I conclude by suggesting this conflicting relationship constitutes our perception of The Commons (which I enjoy capitalizing, even if it's incorrect).
Sidenote: I also enjoy the term "netwar." We seriously need to bring that one back.
I am using snippets of a song by mindmasher called "Take A Look At Me Now."
http://ccmixter.org/files/mindmasher/30143
Take A Look At Me Now by mindmasher is licensed under a Attribution Noncommercial (3.0).
Comments
Technologies of Speech
This is a really great podcast.
Contrary to Walter Ong (and the likes of Steven Pinker in his work The Language Instinct, 1994), I’d like to agree with you in your contention that language itself is a technology. It’s funny that speech is always introduced and perpetuated as a natural phenomenon, one that seems to noetically spur (almost ex nihilio-ly…?) in every individual. Yet, De Saussure, in his Course in General Linguistic (1906-1911), argues that language itself is a system of arbitrary signs (one that, as Kenneth Burke would contend, is generally agreed upon by a social collective) that never “correctly” correlate a signifier with a referent. To augment this claim further, I’d like to expand upon the term ‘language’ to encompass not only speech (verbal utterances that signify in a comprehensible manner) but also the all too often silenced non-speech. In this way, I think gesture and the culturally cultivated politics of gestures are also artificial technologies that have become all together naturalized into our day-to-day interactions. Similarly, these gestures follow the technological stages Baron puts forth in “From Pencils to Pixels:” accessibility, function, and authentication. Gestures are mimetically cultivated from our childhood onward, altering and reforming anew well into adulthood. And they have an arbitrary and artificial gleam to them as well. Gestural norms ebb and flow; altering meaning throughout different contexts. So I suppose it would be productive to look at the ways in which new media technologies illuminate these often “naturalized” features of daily life and how emergent technologies can augment our ingrained verbal and nonverbal communicative/inventive practices.
What's more persuasive than a dinosaur?
Digital Gestures = Emoticons?
Great comments; I like the direction you took this in. I agree: the issue of language as natural is so problematic that I didn't even *begin* to get into deconstructing Ong's assumptive binary. Perhaps this was a shortcoming in my podcast, but then again I'm not sure time would permit even the beginning of such a critique. Although then again, anything is possible with "Podcast Time!"
I think you are onto a really good point about expressive gestural communication. I like how you fit them into Baron's stages; perhaps the "ebb and flow" of "gestural norms" within various contexts constitutes a case of Authentication in action. Knowing the right gesture at the right time as a means of validation... I'm thinking of the scene in "Road Trip" where the stoner has to perform the secret handshake in order to get them all into the fraternity house...
Frequently, gestural actions are neglected in critical discussions of linguistic communication, especially since -as you suggest- they make up such a "naturalized" portion of our daily interactions. Some linguistic theorists do in fact suggest that gestural communications are more "natural" than speaking, in that they occur before/despite a lack of language. My own predilection is to be adverse to any such normative claims, particularly since gestures depend so heavily on mimetic imitation. Like language, we learn to communicate via gestures at a young age by copying others based on contextual cues, which become adopted into our interactive discourse. We can reference Saussure here again, for just as words are arbitrary signifiers, so too are gestures - consider the "thumbs up," which contains a number of different (and contradictory) meanings within various cultures.
Perhaps it would be useful to distinguish expressions from gestures, since many anthropologists claim some sort of cross-cultural recognizable quality to smiling and frowning, but I think this too could be tested. Do gestural or expressive communications take place in seeing-impaired communities? If the primary conveyance of gestural modes is mimetic and visual, then a lack of said actions within these communities might provide evidence that these too must be learned. I can't state with any certainty whether this is true, but it could be a productive line of inquiry.
Maybe rather than engage bodily communications via specific gestures or expressions, those who claim a universality to linguistic occurrence via physicality opt for a kinesthetic tact? Here they might be onto something. There's a cool article on embodied cognition in the Philosophy forum of the NYT that complements our topic nicely; it describes the use of gestural modes as an integral part of cognition itself. Much like many of our ideas are actually formed when writing or speaking, they suggest expressive gestures help constitute communicative thought: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/out-of-our-brains/#more-72875
This has fascinating implications for social interactions (handshaking, body language) and art (dance, comedy), but also for an overlap with technology. Think of a kid nodding yes or no while on a telephone, or in my case, making gestures while recording a podcast, heh. Therefore, your concluding question about gestures in a digital age is a particularly good one; how do we translate these movements online? Are gestures the same as emoticons? Is that the best we can do without video networking? Because I really hope not...
"Legen...wait for it, and I hope you're not lactose-intolerant because the last part is...dary!"
Dinosaurs = All Arguments Are Invalid
Plus, your icon made me think of this professional, profound, and not at all hilarious link:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2125
I'm (always) already persuaded.
"Legen...wait for it, and I hope you're not lactose-intolerant because the last part is...dary!"
"Feedback loop"
Nice work. I very much appreciate your summary of, as you put it, the “feedback loop” by which our understanding of technologies determines their use and our use of technologies determines our understanding. The phrase (feedback loop) suggests, to me at least, that what Ong calls a “law” (“once the word is technologized, there is no really effective way to criticize its condition without the aid of the technology you are criticizing” [28]), is really more of a dynamic system, a “condition” that we might say (although I have some reservations about the metaphor) “evolves” precisely because it is (or seems) inescapable. Feedback loops are, I suppose, generally thought of simply as self-sustaining monotonies (the high-pitched squeal of a mic too close to its speaker, for example), but anyone who has seen the end of a Sonic Youth show (a more complex version of the same mic-speaker effect) knows that even small changes within a feedback system can produce sweeping, often unpredictable results. Limiting myself to the technology of writing for the moment (although I agree with your assertion that language itself is a technology), I would suggest that potentially interesting ways of extending and refining Ong’s argument might be found by considering such topics as: the standardization (or mutability) of orthography, changes in the way that paginal or screen space has been used, and, what is perhaps more interesting, the effects of conscious counter-practice. (A link to a recent essay on technology and counter-practice from ctheory.net: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=609). Again, loved the podcast.
-j.
"Natural" language and Interspecies Rhetoric
First off: Excellent podcast. You have a smooth radio voice.
Like Kylesarus_rex, I was struck by your consideration of language as a technology as well. However, I'd like to play devil's advocate (or maybe devil's wrench thrower) for a moment while proposing a potential new direction of rhetorical inquiry that could grow out of the destabilizing of Ong's fundamental assumptions.
I suppose where I'd like to start is a fantastic Radiolab podcast on "Wild Talk" found here: http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2010/oct/18/wild-talk/. The gist is that biologists have been able to decipher particular utterances by prairie dogs and monkeys, and in the words of Robert Krulwich "[have reduced] wild life to wild talk. There are words in there." While maybe a bit simplified for radio (though Radiolab strikes me as reasonably reliable), the implications of this "natural" talk throws some kinks into our potential readings of Ong and Saussure.
The way I see it, we could look at this two ways. First, we simply go with Ong, that Language is natural - and this 'wild talk' is evidence for 'primary orality' as a characteristic not only in humanity but organic to all life. This may be appealing for animal rights advocates, but what are its implications for rhetoric? I suppose one consideration would be a "stronger strong defense" of rhetoric: you could make a claim that not only is human culture and reality fundamentally rhetorical, but in fact all organic life is at least linguistically based (and potentially rhetorically). From this have all the caveats defined by Lanham simply get extended outwards down the species chain until we decide “well, the dolphins are actually communicating to exact a purpose, but those amoebas obviously aren’t using any language to effect change on their environment.”
Second, we could instead suggest that (and doing a remix of the anthropic principle) we as humans are simply building upon this wild utterance the structure of language. So if we consider this, then we could continue with all speech as inherently artificial/technological - that what we see as animal "language" is rather simply communication (eg: something at the level of 'body language'), and we are on top of this inscribing the structure of language. So while we may consider an utterance from a prairie dog to be "yellow human with orange cap" or such, this would be inherently our inscription of the technology of language on some more primal/instinctive utterance.
This remixing of the anthropic principle might feed back into my previous scenario as well – what if these “natural oralities” that we might see in other species might simply be a human-centered paradigm of language. This scenario is actually probably the most slippery of all these various problems: since once we break out of a human rhetoric, we could begin to ascribe agency to amoebas.
Regardless of if, where, or how the field of interspecies rhetoric takes off, the idea of the ‘naturallness’ of language is going to have to be the first question it takes on.
Great job! I really enjoyed
Great job! I really enjoyed your podcast.
To go along (sort of) with the point you make at the end about language as a technology that we often forget to consider (but to bounce a little to the left), I think to look at music in a similar way provides for a really interesting comparison. Can we look at music as a technology? Well it certainly meets the requirements you mentioned for language: it needed to be invented, there are certainly arguments about authentication and originality, and there is a universality to music that I think, in some cases, transcends even that of oral/written language and can be considered even more ubiquitous.
I also think that music can easily serve as a mediated tool of communication. Take, for example, your podcast -- in addition to the oral language aspect (and the potential written language, both through your explanatory paragraph and if you used a script) you included music, as did many other people making podcasts. Why did you include the music? Merely to entertain? Maybe, but maybe not. Including music adds yet another element to a message -- looking at the songs you chose can either provide another window to the topic you discuss, or can even tell me something about you because you chose the music just as you chose each word you spoke. And of course the music is mediated; you have a little copyright graphic at the bottom to give credit where it's due and it's clear that there are limits to what we can and cannot do with someone else's music. The music is even mediated by you -- you edited pieces to include, shortening them or selecting different parts of songs that you felt conveyed the message you were trying to deliver.
So where do we put music? Do we consider it to be language? Do we consider it a technology? Do we consider it to be oral or written? Does a form of communication need to be one or the other?
Language as technology?: continued
I'd like to jump on to the language-as-technology (or not) bandwagon. It seems as though most of the respondents above are on board with the idea that you suggest: "language is just as much a technology as anything else" (5:17 or so). Broserf_uprising, in one response, raises the idea of “wild talk,” suggesting that perhaps there is something fundamental or innate about oral language—that it is not a technology, but an inherent part of our biology.
I want to toy with this idea for a bit. Here’s where I turn (unabashedly) to Wikipedia. It defines technology as “the usage and knowledge of tools, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or create an artistic perspective.” Indeed, language use is often artistic; language is a tool, and it uses lots of different systems and methods and structures. That’s the nature of the beast. So it’s a technology, right?
Maybe. Can we have a hierarchy of technologies? If so, I would argue, along with Ong, that writing is (way) more of a technology than language itself. Language development is not hierarchical, but dispersed. When we look at Esperanto—the language that was invented in attempt to provide a universal, utopic means of communication—we see that it has (all but) failed. Why? It has failed because it did not generate naturally from a community of speakers. No one spoke it. It was a technology that did not have an organic, necessity-driven birth; it lacked a context and cultural framework.
In contrast, Ong points out that in face-to-face communication, interlocutors can rely on context clues to convey their intended meanings, and that the environment plays just as important a role in the communication act as the words themselves. The interplay between context and meaning is integral to the speakers’ collective understanding. It’s worth noting that many linguists (I’m looking now at Sperber and Wilson’s “Pragmatics, Modularity, and Mind-reading”) write about human cognitive efficiency in the processing of oral language as a natural tendency, evolutionarily determined. Indeed, some linguists and cognitive scientists (like Shockley, Richardson, and Dale in “Conversation and Coordinative Structures”) argue that humans are biologically driven to “coordinate” our gaze, gestures, and body sway when engaged in conversation. They argue that, as people communicate, these things “spontaneously organize” to help facilitate the conversation—which suggests that there is something “beyond technology” (and bodily, or natural) to our use of oral language. Perhaps we can look to the “wild talk” Radio Lab to suggest that there was never a time when “humans” didn’t “talk,” and that to call language is a “technology” is like calling our bodies a “technology.”
Okay, last thing (I promise). Ong’s work made me think of the Scollons’ research on their daughter, Rachel, while living in the Athabaskan community. They, like Ong, argue that there is a fundamental difference between a literate mind and an oral mind. We must read the Scollons’ work cautiously: like Ong’s, it is outdated, and it stereotypes cultures in a way that feels naïve (and uncomfortable) in 2011. Yet their point is that the oral mind is the more “natural” of the two, not requiring the “fictionalization of the self” that is required for the literate mind. There is an extra layer of metacognition required of the literate mind: it has to be aware of the artifice of its creations and of itself as an “author.” On the other hand, with spoken language and primary orality, the speaker does not have to recognize the artifice (if it even is artifice) of her language, and does not have to think of herself as “outside” the context in which she is communicating.
Enough from me! Thanks, Jeff, for a well-crafted and thought-provoking podcast!