Disappearing the Word: Secondary Orality and the New Reader

I reeled to see just how deep those layers of code went, how complicated were the interplays of processes going on beneath the flat, friendly face of the screen, a feeling like looking down the dark well of an elevator shaft without the protection of the closing doors. Under the user interface was the program, under the program was the operating system, under the operating system was the chip, and down there things were happening that were beyond my comprehension or imagination.
--Ellen Ullman, The Bug (277)

The discipline of digital studies often deals with the treatment of literary objects in an electronic world. Online libraries and archives show us a possible future of literature storage and retrieval; adventure games and MUDs allow the reader, in limited ways, to enter the text itself; hypertext novels play with a new, tricky kind of paratext available only with a computer. But new media are not only changing the way we present literature and research materials, though these changes are and will continue to be significant and far-reaching. The advent of the computer, and our increased understanding of the technology we have built and incorporated, is also changing the way we think about the way we think (and the way we read). In other words, not only our literature but our very concept of literature has been altered, and will continue to be altered, by the new technology we use for its creation and access.

And this has happened before. The technologies we use to access language are now so inalienable as to be transparent, but they earned this transparency by causing massive, irrevocable paradigm shifts in human understanding of words, thoughts, facts, and stories. Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy is crucial to understanding the cataclysmic changes brought about by technologies we now regard as routine. Ong's book focuses on the complete cultural and cognitive reconfiguration caused by the advent of written language, and the further reconstructions effected by the printing press. He posits that writing (and, even more so, printing) made the word into a thing -- something tangible, something that exists over time rather than lasting only as long as the breath required to say it. Whereas the power of the word in oral cultures stemmed from its ephemerality, in literate cultures verbal power results from reification -- language is no longer something dispatched, but something recorded. With written language, the word is moved from a sound to a visual, and from an event in time to an event in space; the printing press underscores this shift by making letters and symbols into concrete objects. Whereas the word in an oral culture is a time-bounded event which requires a listener, a written word in a book, or a piece of type, continues to exist when nobody is even looking at it.

Oral cultures, because of the difficulty or impossibility of record-keeping, rely on individual memories (which, in these cultures, are necessarily prodigious) to maintain a sense of history and culture. In a literate society, written language becomes a kind of externalized memory, encouraging a sense of mental and physical continuum between author and text, reader and text, user and technology. Indeed, the posthuman condition addressed by N. Katherine Hayles is essentially a construct of literacy. When words and names, powerful in oral cultures, become expressible in space, their power is transferred to this spatial representation, which accordingly becomes an external and common locus for the previously internal and discrete, and blurs the boundaries between the technology and the self. Naming or description can still have active power; in a fully print-based culture such as ours, words on paper or silicon affect the realities of politics, public opinion, and notably finances (money being reduced to printed paper and records of transactions). In effect, the writing technology becomes an extension of the writer (who can record her opinions, desires, and memories in an external space), the reader (who takes these records and incorporates them into her consciousness), and the thing described (which can be fundamentally changed or influenced by the description). As illustrations, note that we "read Nietzsche" (i.e., look at printed versions of words he once wrote in manuscript), "email our professors" (i.e. record magnetic data intended to be interpreted by the email client and then the brain of its recipient), and "go over our finances" (i.e. examine written records of our buying power, which is represented by nothing in physical space). Thus, the boundary confusions of posthumanity -- the interplay between humans and technology and the prosthetic nature of the body -- are symptoms of a literate culture, in which self/representation distinctions are permeable and the physical body is only one possible instantiation of an internality that can also be expressed on the page.

The most crucial result of literacy, however, remains the idea of word as thing. This is why Ong writes that "writing has transformed human consciousness" (77). The reification of the word is also a separation, a distancing of description from object, of explanation from explanandum. From this distance, the space between ourselves and the separate and manipulable world of semantics, we derive (according to Ong) the ability to analyze and introspect. This seems oxymoronic, given the posthuman nature of literacy, the way in which it blurs the distinctions between our selves and our self-representations, but the effacing of these boundaries makes us paradoxically more aware of them. But in the computer age, writing technology is no longer actively restructuring our consciousness; it has become so ingrained as to be indispensable. What we are now experiencing is what Ong calls "secondary orality." In Orality and Literacy this secondary orality is described with more hand-waving than substance; it is "a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print," in which "we are turned outward because we have turned inward" (134). Struggling to fit an initially confusing digital culture into his theory, Ong never fully attends to the term, and abandons it in this half-baked and flaccid state. If we can adopt and nurture his neglected terminology, however, we will see that there is far more to secondary orality than a "cultivated air of spontaneity... dominated by a sense of closure which is the heritage of print" (135).

Like the printing press and the book, computers and networks are not simply new ways of storing and accessing text, but actively affect our cultural and individual relation to the word. A word on paper is a thing; when you close the book, it will still be there, part of a collection of other word-objects contained in page-objects which make up the book-object that remains the same whether you open it or store it or discard it or hand it to a friend. The words in a Word document, on the other hand, do not actually exist as words, but as polarized impulses on a specific region of a magnetic platter. When the file is open, these impulses are translated into a display that can be understood as language, but when not being displayed, the magnetic information is not readable by the human mind. Likewise, a Web page does not exist as such when not being viewed; it exists on some computer as magnetic impulses translated from HTML code and image files, but these are translated back into words and pictures, and these words and pictures are newly arranged, each time the page is accessed. In effect, we are now in a period of "secondary orality" not only because, as Ong suggests, we have re-established some of the spontaneity and group consciousness of primary orality. We are in secondary orality because the reification of the word, effected by writing and affirmed by the printing press, is now being effaced by digital media.

Where does this leave us? Somewhere far beyond texts that exploit the computer medium, such as Andrew Plotkin's "Shade" and Michael Joyce's "Afternoon." As rich or innovative as these texts may be, they are only symptoms of a greater sea change. What we will eventually see from digital media is a new kind of literature, certainly, but more importantly we will see a new kind of reader. Of course we cannot completely bracket the content of new media works, especially because the plot and story elements often reflect the reader's experience navigating the digital story (the investigative layering of "Afternoon," for instance, or the scattering and piecing together of the main character in Shelley Jackson's "Patchwork Girl"). But electronic literature is still in its infancy, and there has not been time for works to prove themselves as masterpieces, even if authors have truly become familiar enough with the changing media to produce great works. We could spend our time pondering whether digital literature should be evaluated on the same criteria as traditional codex literature, or whether it requires a new set of critical parameters -- Espen Aarseth has already made great strides in comparing the special features of electronic literature to those of its codex equivalents, and proposing new criteria for addressing digital media. I believe, however, that the more important issue is this: How will digital media affect our approach to all literature, on and off the computer?

We would be well served to learn from the paradigm shifts surrounding the alphabet and the printing press, and to predict and examine how "secondary orality" will once again reform the study and use of language. The reversed reification of the word, and its relegation to a non-space in the computer which cannot be accessed or interpreted by the human mind, will have profound implications for writers and critics; it will produce a new kind of reader, one who has relinquished belief in the materiality of language. The content of early work incorporating new media -- "Patchwork Girl," for instance, which compares the text to a scattered body, or The Bug, which examines the similarities between programming and linguistics -- hints that writers are already aware that the "thing" status of their words is breaking down, that the reader is questioning what it means to read a story or understand a word, what "story" and "word" actually are. Digital media have destroyed, or at least reconfigured, the spatiality of language. The question we should be asking ourselves is: Where will we go from nowhere?