Essay Topic Question 3

I don't know if anyone else was confused about "secondary orality" but I sure as hell was. I found the passage in Dean's book and I thought I would share it to anyone else working on question #3. I don't knwo if it will help anyone, but here it is, and I cite Dean...

"Instead of judging blog posts as a literary form, it is more38 While the idea of secondary

 

5. Ideas are understood in terms of their connection with

actual experience, with the lifeworld, rather than abstractly

or within a more general analytic field (

anyone who has been the victim of homophobic violence, then

homophobic violence must not be a problem

6. Knowledge and ideas appear agonistically, polarized, as

part of everyday struggle.

7. Ideas are treated in terms of empathy and its lack: that is

to say, in an immediate and participatory rather than a

distanced fashion."

if I don’t know);

useful to consider them as a form of expression in between

orality and literacy, or perhaps as a kind of “secondary orality,”

to use Walter Ong’s term.

orality remained relatively unexplored at the time of Ong’s

death, his characterization of orally based thought includes

attributes already key features of mobile, SMS, and online

communication:

1. Thoughts are combined and points are made in ways that

are additive rather than supportive; differently put, people

string syntactic elements together with “and” rather than

with subordinate clauses.

2. The elements of thoughts and ideas are aggregative rather

than analytical (a contemporary example might be the

slogans, clichés, and memes that catch on and stand-in for

ideas and feelings that remain unexplored).

3. Ideas and points are frequently repeated.

4. Traditions are conserved (because little to nothing is

written down, remembering is difficult; hence, not only do

points need to be repeated but they need to be attributed

to tradition).