We want larger than life stories to remember the simple things — I’ve gone off the beaten track for the past couple of emails. And it’s time to get back to Ong and his characteristics of oral cultures. And today, we’re going to look at The noetic role of heroic ‘heavy’ figures and of the bizarre In this, Ong focuses on the…

Oral, literate & post-literate time — Somewhere time slipped away on me. Now that I’ve got a moment, it seems like the perfect catalyst to think about how time plays into our post-literate lives. Time is one of these funny things about life. It happens, and you can’t stop it. Days, seasons, lunar cycles, life, growth…

Old world relationships & social structures — When I originally set out thinking about the social implications of orality and the postliterate world, I immediately imagined a series of old-world relationships. Ones that still exist today, though maybe overlooked or under-utilized, or ones that may have been forgotten or no longer seemed “relevant.” Here’s an example: how…

Same, same but different? — More of Ong’s characteristics of an oral society. “[O]ral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance.” Have you wondered why it’s taken humanity so long to progress? Unless it has a practical function…

Literacy will always have a place — Between the years 550 and 700, something interesting happened. With the fall of Rome, we stopped speaking and using Latin. What’s more, languages shifted and mutated in various parts of the world and by 700 the common person couldn’t speak it, nor did they have anyone in their lives that…

Get used to the word, it’s running wild on the internet — Thanks to Clubhouse (this one, not that one), the internet is abuzz with “social audio.” How can I not talk about this!? Orality. Post-literate. Yada Yada! Twitter and Facebook are getting into the game along with lots of others. [ ok, enough with the links. ] What is social audio? I immediately thought of…

A characteristic of oral culture — It’s time for the next review of one of Ong’s characteristics of an Oral culture. Additive rather than subordinative At the heart of it, Oral cultures avoid subordinate thought. There is no real order per se but a series of “and”s. Joe went to sleep. And Joe plowed his field. And Joe drank a…

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it never was. — In the world of ecology, things are never the same, only evolving. In my intro to this project, I talked about the story of the wolves of Yosemite. 14 wolves had amazingly positive results, but is Yosemite’s ecology the exact same as it was before everything when south? No. It…

With medium.com — Since it’s inception I’ve had this on again and off again relationship with medium.com. For the next bit, I’m back. I reactivated my subscription. Set up the custom domain, ethernick.com, and whenever that propagates, it will now live here. Moving Orality too Additionally, my substack project around orality will be moving over here…