“Human communication, verbal or other, differs from the conventional or “medium” model most basically in that it is interactive.”
– Walter Ong
According to Merriam-Websters dictionary, ‘communication’ means “a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior”
I’ve always wondered of the origin of something, let alone the origin of communication! While reading some excerpts from Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, I often question myself, “how did communication came to be?” I imagine prehistoric human beings with their primitive ways sounding like animals with weird noises.
As we humans advanced in lifestyle – discovering fire, from hunting nomads to farming settlers, our way to communicate evolved as well (See what I did with the title? Hehe). There’s always somewhere to start. Communication started off with sounds, then to words until there is a structure of sentences for better communication – orality. Furthermore, this progressed into better ways of storing knowledge. Enter literacy. Humans develop the technique of reading and writing with the use if tools such as paper and pens. Fast-forward to today, we now have different media that process, exchange, send and receive information.
What are the differences between primary oral cultures and literary cultures? How are they related with each other?
Oral cultures are those that use primarily a verbal medium to communicate with each other while literary cultures use tools such as pen and papers to read and write. A long time ago, people communicated with only orality. Someone sometime ago realized that there is a need to store information, especially the repeating ones such as skills, values and stories from generation to generation. This gave rise to literacy. The literary culture is built on the oral culture. One thing in common – they are used to communicate, process and exhange information between person to person.
What does Walter Ong mean by the intersubjectivity of communication? How does this differentiate communication from media?
Intersubjectivity in a culture means that the group of people agrees on a set of ideas, definitions and situations. This is when there’s an exchange of information from a person to another – there’s interaction. Walter Ong describes the ‘intersubjectivity of communication’ as having the same thoughts with the person you are communicating with. Communication from media are those from newspapers, radio, magazines, TV news, the internet, etc. These do not require a response from the receiver (i.e. the intended audience) as compared to intersubjectivity of communication by which it’s the exchange of ideas and thoughts between people.
How does the ‘media’ model of communication show chirographic (i.e. writing) conditioning?
In any ‘media’ model of communication, there’s always the sender, the receiver and the medium in which bridges both of them. We can see the relationship of the three elements. Specifically in chirography, the author writes to his/her intended audience without expectations of feedback. The sender which is the writer only intends to present ideas to the readers, unlike the direct exchange of information between the sender and receiver in a dialogue.
References
Walter J. Ong, Orality & Literacy: The Technologogizing of the Word, Routledge: London and New York, 1982.
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