"We are not concerned with the so-called computer languages..." (Ong 7) But perhaps we should be. My co-worker, Victor, is a self taught wizard at any sort of computer based editing. Video, audio, digital imaging. And before everyone relegates that to pasting Sarah Palin's head on a gun and bikini body, I want to point out a feature of some new software he got the other day. It allows him to type in a phrase (e.g. "and then Bam fell of the wall") and it can search through a collection of audio and video clips for every oral instance of that phrase. Here's why this is significant: Ong's intoduction portays a linear development from oral, to written, to electronic. No problem there. We must not confuse development with purpose and usage though. The secondary reality of the electronic medium is circling us back into the oral, from storytellers, to novelists, to YouTube, as it were. What could the next development possibly be? Each medium depends on the chronologically prior to come into existence, but the danger lies in assuming that a new development makes the earlier ones obsolete.
Whorf (I'm sorry, I'm not going to make the Star trek joke, but I couldn't get it out of my head.)
I'm not going to be quoting Whorf's Data (or his Ryker, or his Picard. Ok, sorry, I'll quit it, a little punchy this week).
2 points: Maybe I've got a little Hopi in me, I've argued for the non-existence of time since my undergrad metaphysics course 14 years ago. Their spatial concept being wrapped up in the relation of manifesting to manifested is actually more coherent than our view of space and time as entirely different kinds of conceptual fields. Ours space and time may interpenetrate each other; their manifesting and manifested actually touch each other.
Point 2: What does this reading have to do with a classroom, or Literacy discourse, anyway? Here's my take. I doubt I'll frequently have a Hopi in my classes. However, I will have people with different weltanshauungs shaped by their out of school language. I need to be ready to for the confusion I and they will experience when our linguistic universes don't match, and treat those instances as opportunities for both our worlds to grow. Otherwise, I'll become a Freirean oppresor-educator, by forcing the student to accept my language as the "proper" one.
