The features of orality: Environmental immersion—experiencing the world live
My two cents on the introspection debate
Popular perception sees orality and literacy as spoken and written forms of communication. But that’s only part of the picture, rather superficial. The essential distinction between orality and literacy lies in cognitive structures: it’s not listening vs. reading, it’s more about situational immersion vs. detachment. Excerpts from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.
In his 2017 Media Ecology, Lance Strate shares a neat observation from Max Frisch’s 1959 novel Homo Faber: “Technology is the art of never having to experience the world.”[1] Strate writes:
Whatever comes between us and our world, that is, whatever mediates between us and our world, becomes our world. Our mediations are what we know. They are all we know. They become our environment.[2]
If media mediate the world, then the less we use media, the more of the world we sense. Conversely, when we are fully immersed in media, we sense no world at all. This seems to be the endpoint of media evolution: when we completely merge with our media, they will become our only “natural” environment. At that point, media will lose their mediating function. The user, media, and environment will become one.
But that’s the “end.” At the beginning of media evolution, a human being was fully immersed in the world, with no mediation, like all other living creatures. The Promethean gift of fire and tools started mediation (and media evolution), shielding humans from nature—but still keeping us within nature.
The rule “the less we use media, the more of the world we sense” has a corollary. Since media extend humans, the less we use media, the less extended we are and the smaller our world is. When considering the farthest-reaching tools, such as arrows or other thrown weapons, an oral person’s reach is roughly a sphere with a radius of 50–60 meters. Vision extends perception to hundreds of meters, and so does hearing. The exact distances can be debated, but the pattern is clear: an oral person’s experience of the world is physically limited by how far the senses can reach or the body can act, even when they are extended by tools. In orality, a person is immersed in the babble of immediate experience, limited by physical reach.
Speech, without a doubt, can extend individual experience beyond physical reach. But for speech to extend our perception of the world, others are required. Oral experience, extended beyond personal reach, is a product of collective effort. The world reached through speech is the world of the tribe, not of the individual.
As a consequence, an oral person does not endeavor to judge beyond personal or tribal experience, that is, beyond experience lived through, individually or collectively. This was also confirmed by Alexander Luria in his Central Asian study. Luria asked illiterate participants to complete a syllogism: “In the far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the far North. What color are the bears in Novaya Zemlya?” The typical answers were, “I don’t know, I have never seen them,” or “You need to ask those who were there. Or the elders, they might know.”[3]
Interestingly, when the syllogism was offered to a 45-year-old foreman of a collective farm who had just learned to read, he answered: “To go by your words, they should all be white.” [4] As Walter Ong highlights in analyzing this story, having only recently become familiar with the literate way of thinking, this person still refers to the researcher’s description (“to go by your words”). [5] He does not take responsibility for a speculative statement that has no basis in his experience. Nevertheless, he appears to be capable of completing the syllogism.
Illiterate people, or rather people of primary orality, were not practically interested in what lay beyond their reach. They were not capable of deriving such knowledge from speculation (syllogism). Why would they want to do that? For this reason, unlike literate individuals, they refrained from making statements about things they had not personally experienced.
Environmental immersion also has a rigid temporal dimension. All beings immersed in the environment are confined to the eternal “now.” Orality is always about the “now,” while literacy is about the “not now.” Living in the “now” leaves no room for reflection. Orality places the individual within events, within the world of the “here and now,” while literacy allows anyone to bring any time and any place in the world into a written, induced reality.
While analyzing TV replays used in news or sports broadcasts, McLuhan comes to a conclusion about the opposition between experience and meaning. The TV replay allows us to extract meaning from experience without actually experiencing it. “In fact, such is the nature of experience that it is almost inevitable that we do miss the meaning,” concludes McLuhan.
Sports referees now rely on replays to make decisions about what just happened. In this way, according to McLuhan, the instant replay exposes “the difference between cognition and recognition.” [6] Living in the moment and being immersed in the “here and now” obstructs the very possibility of recognition. A disruptive media intervention in the natural flow of time is needed—an arrest of time, a rewind, and a replay of an event—to recognize what is happening. This is what recording media enabled, first with writing and later with TV: they replay reality, extending it in time and giving the mind time for reflection.
The limitation of the world by spatial personal reach and temporal “eternal now” is a fundamental condition of situational immersion. This condition was one of the features of primary orality that have been retrieved by digital orality.
Digital media extend users’ reach tremendously, allowing us to communicate across the globe instantly. Yet they place the user in a bubble of immediate digital experience, similar to what Eli Pariser described as a “filter bubble.”[7] The bubble of digital experience is not physical but social, and its range is limited not by the senses or thrown implements, but by algorithms and the user’s social graph. However, the effect is similar: it is shaped in the form of audile-tactile space; it is simultaneous in a 360-degree sphere and strictly limited by situational “practical needs,” now shaped by digital media.
However, surprisingly (or not), the literate aptitude for speculative statements with no support in personal experience has survived digitalization. Physical distance is no longer an obstacle to “awareness” of polar bears. Media deliver images of them—media induce the faked, simulated experience of seeing polar bears. Since social media encourage personal engagement, users can, or rather even have to, make judgments about events or processes of which they have no real personal experience whatsoever. But people have an enriched and extended—media-induced—experience of all sorts of polar bears that they have encountered on TV and now on the internet.
That is why personal but non-experiential judgment has outlived literacy and flourishes on the internet. Such judgment remains speculative but is no longer syllogistic; social media judgment represents an oral-literate hybrid of speculation and immersion: speculation based on media-induced “lived experience.”
The environmental immersion of orality also means immersion into the most important part of the environment—the collective…
Read soon: “Features of orality: collective involvement.”
Read more: Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.)
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
[1] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition, p. 110.
[2] Strate, Lance. (2017). Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition, p. 110.
[3] Luria, Alexander. (1976). Cognitive Development, p. 108. See also: Mir, Andrey. (2022). “Media-ecological engineering of the Soviets.” Explorations in Media Ecology, Volume 21, Issue 2-3, Oct 2022, p. 150.
[4] Luria, Alexander. (1976). Cognitive Development, p. 114.
[5] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 52.
[6] McLuhan, Marshall. (1974). “At the moment of Sputnik the planet became a global theater in which there are no spectators but only actors,” p. 57.
[7] Pariser, Eli. (2011). The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think.