From the NYT:
“Orality is the base of all human experience,” says Lance Strate, a communications professor at Fordham University and devoted MySpace user. He says he is convinced that the popularity of social networks stems from their appeal to deep-seated, prehistoric patterns of human communication. “We evolved with speech,” he says. “We didn’t evolve with writing.”
The growth of social networks — and the Internet as a whole — stems largely from an outpouring of expression that often feels more like “talking” than writing: blog posts, comments, homemade videos and, lately, an outpouring of epigrammatic one-liners broadcast using services like Twitter and Facebook status updates (usually proving Gertrude Stein’s maxim that “literature is not remarks”).
“If you examine the Web through the lens of orality, you can’t help but see it everywhere,” says Irwin Chen, a design instructor at Parsons who is developing a new course to explore the emergence of oral culture online. “Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present. The Web is all of these things.”
One Comment
That is really true. I remember you said something similar back in the beginning of the semester about the ‘orality’ of people on the internet. I was thinking about something similar the other day. Through my own observations this is was I concluded. There are a mass ammount of people in America who only use the same certian words over and over. All these people don’t nessacarilly use the same group of words, but they limit themselves to certian vocabulary. I just think it’s so funny because there is so many words out there. I catch myself using certian words repetively somedays too, however some cases are more severe than others.