Orality and Literacy...

When I finished reading the first half of Orality and Literacy, it made me think about different cultures.

I quickly began to compare our society with an oral culture.

Lets take a young college student, one of us, going to a completely oral society. No books. No internet. No magazines. Nothing to read. At all. What you hear is all you know. Comparing this to our lives, we can quickly see that any of us would have trouble coping. With the way our society functions today, our minds go a mile a minute. We have short attention spans. It’s hard for some of us to pay attention to one thing for longer than a few minutes. This would not go over well in an oral society. You cannot use the excuse that if you miss something in lecture, you can just look it up in your textbook. There would be no text book for you to use. Insane.

One of the characteristics listed in chapter 3 explains that oral societies are very redundant in what they say. This is because if you miss what someone says you cannot ‘look it up’. By being repetitive, they can ensure no one misses anything. Or so they hope.

But what if they do miss something?? What happens then? Stories began to change. People add in their own ideas, or just leave things out when they forget. This raises the question as to how much stories changed before they began to be written down. How much of our history do we not know? Until the first person wrote down the history of humans, stories could have changed a few times or a hundred times. No one really knows for sure. But we do know, that since the first literate culture, we have some documented history. And now, even if stories change, we can ‘look it up’ and figure out the truth.

I think many of us depend on being able to look things up and if we would have to go to an oral society, I am not sure how any of us would survive.