Today, we are witnessing the reemergence in electronic form of oral patterns that have been hiding in plain site for generations. So deeply ingrained is our cultural disposition toward literacy, however, that many of us fail to recognize the oral characteristics of electronic media. Today, writers inevitably tend to describe the web in terms of “publishing” or, like H.G. Wells, to compare it to a vast library. And while the web does indeed support new kinds of publishing, it is also a place to “talk.”

Wright, Glut, page 232

Walter Ong calls this “secondary orality,” that is, orality which is written in the technical sense (via pecking at a keyboard) but which is fundamentally an element of oral culture. So, when you rant on Twitter about your coworker who can’t stop twirling her hair, or text your spouse to please pick up a bottle of wine on the way home, you’re engaging in an oral tradition, not a literate one.

Think that through, and it’s not surprising that replies emerged organically on Twitter and elsewhere; having a conversation means talking to other people. Absent the technical means to do that, we invented a method that was then widely, and rapidly, adopted.

Interestingly, with secondary orality, we have orality that looks like literacy, but isn’t. Strange things can happen when you miss that point. Flipboard aggregates content from your social graph in really lovely ways, but the juxtaposition of oral culture in an essentially literate design doesn’t always make sense. It’s quite odd to see your friend’s tweet about their breakfast burrito elevated to a strikingly designed pull quote. The pull quote is a design pattern that emerged from a culture of publishing—from a process by which an editor would carefully select a bit of text that, when extracted and enlarged, would resonate with the greater work. But here, there is no greater work, and no editor: only the blind act of an algorithm.

That algorithm knows a lot about who your friends are, and what they recommend, but it does not (yet, at least), recognize the difference between talking and publishing. The result is content that looks beautiful, typographically speaking, but whose effect is dissonant, rather than engaging. Designing for secondary orality is going to require developing new patterns, not merely pouring words into the old ones.

“That’s how it is—we’re literate. And we’re word processors now too, since information theory and the computer are hooked up together. That’s dandy. But why do we lock ourselves into one mode? Why either/or? We aren’t binary. Why have we replaced oral text with written? Isn’t there room for both?”¹ This is Le Guin, in the essay, Text, Silence, Performance. The question is one that animates much of her novel, Always Coming Home, in which an unnamed editor collects stories and texts about the Kesh, a people who may live many years from now in what we today call California. The Kesh are literate—all Kesh children learn to read and write—but they maintain an oral culture alongside that literacy: a cyclical, rather than linear view of time; many spoken performances, plays, chants, and songs, some of which are forbidden from being written down; and the privileging of spoken dialogue as the means of building understanding among people, especially when in conflict. The editor of the book writes:

The Kesh distinguished writing and speaking, the written and the spoken word, not as two versions of one thing, but as different activities with a large area of overlap, different languages with a large but not total area of translatability. They saw as a primary distinction between the oral and the written text the quality of the relationship established.

Undoubtedly one can and will say (formally or informally) what one wouldn’t write (or wouldn’t say knowing that it was being recorded). The writer’s solitude might look like maximum freedom, but the immediate relationship between speaker and hearer(s) may increase freedom by increasing trust. (A writer of course may remain anonymous as a speaker cannot, but anonymity or a pen-name, denying the self, denies even the possibility of trust.)

Between writer and reader, the text itself mediates. It may be properly seen as a communication rather than a relation. In Kesh terms, the connection between writer and reader is not a present one: it is made in the nonpresent, in the Houses of the Sky—and so all written narration is in the Four House Mode. But speaking a text, prepared or improvised, and listening to it constitute a relationship in the Five Houses of the Earth, a connection of present contemporaries, “people breathing together.”

Le Guin, Always Coming Home, page 585

To be “present contemporaries” is to be present in the same time and place; both coexistence and presence are required for that relationship to unfold. That may in fact be a useful definition of relationship: a presence in both body and voice, both breath and spirit.

The written word is there, for anyone, at any time. It is general and potentially eternal. The spoken word is here, to you, now. It is ephemeral and irreproducible. (We might question the latter word, but the mechanical reproduction, even the moving picture with sound, make an image but does not reconstitute the occasion, the time, the place, or the people there.)

Le Guin, Always Coming Home, page 585

In our contemporary moment, much of that spoken word has given way to what Walter Ong refers to as “secondary orality”—speech that is sustained by networks and devices which are themselves dependent on writing.² Secondary orality very often precludes presence in both time and space: when we speak into the stream, we are present neither to others nor, in most cases, to ourselves. And as that stream becomes saturated with machine generated language—language in which neither presence nor relation nor trust are possible—we lose even the nonpresent mode of the word. The word becomes neither there nor here.

Le Guin gives us a glimpse of another way. The Kesh are not ignorant of digital technologies. The world in their time is connected via a vast computer system with huge amounts of data, text, story, audio, information, literature. Anyone is free to interact with that system as they like, and some few people choose to make it the locus of their work. But to connect to this network requires visiting an exchange—a physical place—of which there is only one in the entire valley. They could have more exchanges, if they liked, but they choose not to. They do not carry the network in their pockets, nor do they invite it into their homes. Perhaps there is a clue: that to keep the word, we must keep our distance.