Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628. Peter Claesz.

Orality and literacy are the original “media” of communication. Speech, text and reading have all developed and amalgamated into what we tend to think of as “media” today: television, the cinema, the internet, social media, and so forth.

In The Interface Between the Written and the Oral, anthropologist Jack Goody conducts an in-depth analysis of the complex relationship between writing and speech (the literate and the oral). “If language is inextricably associated with ‘culture,” he argues, “it is writing that is linked with ‘civilization.'” Written in 1987, his analysis provides a foundation from which to understand and explore these modes as they have developed.

Looking at this relationship from a less anthropological standpoint, Walter J. Ong characterizes the differences between oral and literate cultures in his seminal text, Orality and Literacy. Ong asks his readers to try and “imagine a culture where no one has ‘looked up’ anything,” an idea that seems more and more bizarre the longer you think about how computers and cell phones are now used in everyday life.

Any investigation of the history of media or new media theory of course benefits from an analysis of media’s historical development, but in thinking about the way we use our bodies to communicate through interfaces as they are known today, an anthropological background helps root these investigations in the development of humanity itself.

Fields: Anthropology, Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Media Theory and History, Computers and Composition

Scholars: Walter Ong, James Paul Gee, Jack Goody, Alan Liu

Resources: 

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy 

James Paul Gee’s essays on sociocultural approaches to literacy and technology, discourse analysis and more: http://jamespaulgee.com/publications

Watch a full-length interview with anthropologist Jack Goody here.