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- Volume 11, Issue 3, 2012
Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 11, Issue 3-4, 2012
Volume 11, Issue 3-4, 2012
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Walter Ong and media ecology
More LessAbstractThe centennial of Walter Ong’s birth provides an occasion to revisit his work and weigh how he fits into the group of key figures for media ecology. His work provides a grounding of communication study apart from the media; it demonstrates a methodology helpful for further work; and it reminds media ecologists of the value of interdisciplinary work.
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Refining secondary orality: Articulating what is felt, explaining what is implied
More LessAbstractWalter J. Ong presented secondary orality as the stage of human communication following the age of print. But while Ong mentioned secondary orality in several significant publications, his scholarship on the concept was scattered, introductory and incomplete. This article synthesizes a definition of secondary orality from the entirety of Ong’s scholarship, in an effort to unify, develop and produce a comprehensive theory of secondary orality. Gathering references to secondary orality across decades of Ong’s scholarship reveals secondary orality to be defined by the merger of the dynamics of primary orality and typographic literacy, the re-emergence of the social and participatory nature of sound and a tension between planning and spontaneity. Such a cohesive definition enables scholars of sound to test the secondary orality thesis against emerging sound innovations, like Apple’s newly introduced voice-activated assistant, Siri.
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Primary issues with secondary orality
More LessAbstractThis article examines two of Walter Ong’s signature concepts in culture and communication theory: secondary orality and residual orality. The author argues that these two concepts, as deployed today by many scholars in discussions of electronic and digital media, are highly problematic. Stemming from the author’s study of a particular region and contingent of humankind that was not on Ong’s cultural radar, the article attempts to demonstrate why scholars need to reflect further on these definitional models and argues for a more supple comprehension and application of the terms.
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Ong, Hopkins, and the evolution of consciousness
By Jerry HarpAbstractAlthough Father Walter J. Ong is most widely known for his orality–literacy scholarship, we do well to bear in mind that his most advanced formal training was in literary studies. From early on in these studies, the figure he wrote about and continued to write about throughout his life was the poet, and fellow Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ong was drawn to Hopkins in large part for the bearing of his writing on the evolution of human consciousness. Ong discovered in his Master’s thesis on Hopkins’ sprung rhythm – written under Marshall McLuhan – that Hopkins was in some sense hearing in advance the sounds of what would become twentieth-century modernism. Hopkins displayed a sensibility and awareness that were compelling for the modernist writers of the twentieth century, as they carried out their experiments with finding new voices, new ways of writing poetry for the changed world in which they found themselves. Hopkins’ feel for the distinctive self, seeking connection with other selves in the uncertainties of time, played no small role in this appeal. Ong’s work on Hopkins is a model for both literary criticism and studies in the evolution of consciousness.
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Walter Ong in the present moment of truth
More LessAbstractIn The Presence of the Word (1967), Walter J. Ong provides a phenomenological account of human decision-making based on principles of orality. In his discussion, he considers the radically existential resonance of the familiar phrase ‘the moment of truth’ as a uniquely human event uniting human will and judgment in a decisive moment of thought and speech in action. This article explores the ground of Ong’s account in his work on orality, presence and personalism related to his Christian commitments to Incarnation as a personal union of time and eternity.
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Walter Ong and Harold Bloom can help us understand the Hebrew Bible
More LessAbstractCertain observations made by Harold Bloom regarding the Hebrew Bible can be considered in the framework of Walter Ong’s multivariate account of western cultural history, including his own discussion of aspects of the Hebrew Bible. By doing this, I create a win-win situation. On the one hand, I use Ong’s various observations to deepen and strengthen Bloom’s observations regarding the Hebrew Bible. On the other hand, I use Bloom’s most pointed observations to deepen and strengthen some of Ong’s larger considerations.
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Walter Ong as teacher: The conversation continues
More LessAbstractThis article examines how the qualities that Walter Ong admired in excellent teachers interrelate with themes from his many publications, as teaching and scholarship converge into conversation that deals ‘with the core of human experience’. In his teaching and his scholarship, Ong’s conversation was rooted in personalist, evolutionary and ecological thinking. One focus of Ong’s scholarship was how communications technology influences interpersonal relationships and our concept of what constitutes knowing. He called attention to the fact that new technologies can obscure the inherently dialogic nature of thinking and was motivated in his media ecology work to identify how visualist models of noetics might be supplemented by auditory models, including an ‘oral hermeneutic’ that situates knowing within holistic dialogue. The traits that Ong admired in his teachers were ones that he emulated in his own teaching. In particular, his description of Marshall McLuhan is particularly apt for himself: his ‘probes’ were ‘a way of teaching, if teaching means getting people to think’.
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Intersections of Walter Ong’s pedagogy and theoretical ideas
More LessAbstractA former student of Walter Ong reflects on his pedagogy and theories based on her experiences. The article focuses on classroom instructions – beginning with Ong’s famous index card assignment, favourite lines, or ‘Ongisms’ – such as ‘There is always an “us”’, and personal interactions that made the author aware of the limitations of her ‘text-bound mind’, taught her to explore her own biases calmly and indelibly shaped that way she read, studied and understood texts and media.
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Home is where the brain wires: Technology, fixity and adaptation
More LessAbstractThis article reworks the concept of ‘home’ in the light of everyday technology and media use, recombining central ideas from phenomenology, media ecology and neuroscience. First, fundamental concepts in the works of Martin Heidegger and Marshall McLuhan are reinterpreted. Second, these ideas are updated by coupling them to recent research in neuroscience. Third, in a synthesizing movement, the notion of ‘home’ is reformulated starting from these reinterpretations. From this new perspective, it appears no longer to be a concept merely bound to place or space. It is a fundamental way of interacting through and with (technological) environments that resonates throughout the breadth of existence: a dynamic or dialectic between stasis and change, fixity and adaptation.
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Responding to humanoid robots: A call to examine the role of instincts
Authors: Lawrence Gorman and Maria PolskiAbstractUsing concepts from media ecology and cognitive science, the article examines some mechanisms that underlie our responses to humanoid robots. It suggests that ‘tertiary orality’ (talking to robots and computers) requires caution: humans are prompted by their instincts to personalize the voices, faces and body language of robots and computers; humans also seem to be designed to attribute intention and emotion where none is present. We argue that the combination of new technology and ancient human instincts creates the uncanny: the familiar in the strange and the strange in the familiar, which is simultaneously seductive and alienating; we argue that people should be educated to understand these phenomena. This is an area where media ecology can make an important contribution.
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Metaphors and morality: Are digital media epistemologically compatible with moral socialization?
More LessAbstractRecent neurological research supports a media ecology approach to suggest an epistemological incompatibility between digital and mobile media and moral and ethical socialization. The digital transformation of social and interpersonal discourse may cause succeeding generations of digital natives to develop an inability to conceptualize, contemplate and subsequently act on moral concepts and ethical principles. Media ecology, as defined by Neil Postman (1970), examines how media influence perception, understanding and value, and their impact on our survival. These issues are at the heart of morality and ethics. Neurological research has shown the brain’s plasticity allows use of media technology to alter how we think as well as the anatomy of the brain itself. A comparison of the epistemological requirements of moral socialization and the epistemological characteristics of media indicates that digital media may be particularly ineffective in communicating essential moral concepts. Implications for future research and the associated responsibility of educators and media practitioners are discussed.
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Memory and morality
More LessAbstractIt has long been recognized that the Holocaust poses special challenges. On the one hand, historical research has accumulated a detailed and penetrating account of the events. On the other hand, efforts at understanding and commemorating these events transcend professional history and take shape in the public sphere. In the public sphere, however, memory of the Holocaust is shaped just as much by art and by fiction as by history. The influence of films on the Holocaust is especially important in this context to the extent that audiences take them to be, if not true, ultimately realistic depictions of past experience. This article challenges the notion that the memory of the Holocaust is best served by the effort to recreate experience, and argues that there are deeply moral implications of how the present uses its past.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Robert K. Logan and Geraldine E. ForsbergAbstractProgram Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands For A Digital Age, Douglas Rushkoff (2010) New York: O/R Books, 152 pp., ISBN: 978-1-935928-15-7, P/BK, $14.95
On The Binding Biases Of Time And Other Essays On General Semantics And Media Ecology, Lance Strate (2011) Fort Worth, TX: Institute Of General Semantics, 302 pp., ISBN: 978-0-9827559-2-1, H/Bk, $48, Isbn: 978-0-9827559-3-8, P/BK, $16
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 22 (2023)
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Volume 21 (2022)
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Volume 20 (2021)
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Volume 19 (2020)
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Volume 18 (2019)
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Volume 17 (2018)
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Volume 16 (2017)
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Volume 15 (2016)
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Volume 14 (2015)
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Volume 13 (2014)
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Volume 12 (2013)
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Volume 11 (2012)
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Volume 10 (2011)
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Volume 9 (2010)
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Volume 8 (2009)
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Volume 7 (2008)
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Volume 6 (2007)
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Volume 5 (2006)
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Volume 4 (2005)
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Volume 3 (2004)
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Volume 2 (2003)
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Volume 1 (2002)