I’ve written a bit about the Gutenberg Parenthesis (here), and since then, I have been seeing so many things taking place in education (and the culture at large) which seem to relate to the ideas implicit with this theory. Secondary Orality (a wonderfully elusive sounding term…) is a situation where we are inexorably reverting to a discursive reality. This means that inexact give and take which is a part of discussions and how we deal with each other in the real world will supplant the textual (context) of more formal life (that is, talking may win over reading as far as the prime means of dealing with information).
This gets messy here…in that this is not a recipe to burn all the books and live in the woods. It means that how we write (and how we read) may change too!
A great example of what I am talking about here (note that I am talking!) would be Facebook, and especially how the young use it (i.e. high school and college students). I am not interested in what is being communicated, but the tone and means of how it is presented and perceived is interesting. Facebook is a port modern version of the old back yard fence, where you can gossip with the neighbors.
Facebook may look like a text medium, but only in that it uses typing for a communications medium. This is a forum replete with subjective perspectives and little really important information which has some ‘provenance’ (i.e. is a provable fact). Opinions rule in Facebook.
SMS text messaging is a similar situation, and Twitter could be seen as a text message version of the news (if you continue with this idea of ‘secondary orality’).
Web 2.0, Secondary Orality, and the Gutenberg Parenthesis
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2008/03/web-20-secondary-orality-and-the-gutenberg-parenthesis.aspx
In the large picture of human history, the brief few centuries when print reigned unchallenged as the most revered form of knowledge will be seen as a mere parenthesis. Before Gutenberg, knowledge was formed orally and, now, in this post-Gutenberg era, knowledge is formed — increasingly — through "secondary orality" on the Internet (Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word. New Accents Ed Terence Hawkes (New York: Methuen, 1988).).
The sequence is: orality –> literacy –> secondary orality as the primary locus of knowledge authority over the last 500-plus years. Over the thousands of years of human history, those 500 years are a parenthesis.
