When it comes to what is asserted to be the return of orality as it existed before the written medium, how do we square its fundamental proposition with machines that double as written documents? In what follows, I hope to add texture to the question of orality in the digital age by considering the actual architecture of the material and theoretical systems that we use to access digital spaces of speech, and thus examine how on both the level of initial abstraction and embodied material system, the computer is, in many capacities, a written document in itself.
The first step of the analysis would be finding a good distinguishing characteristic between oral speech and the written work that can be treated as operative. We can find this in one of the main concerns Socrates has within the Phaedrus towards the non-dynamic nature of the written document. “Writing, Phaedrus, has some sort of uncanny power, … if one asks them something, they haughtily keep silent” (Plato, 275e). The written document is a static object in terms of the symbols and author-encoded meanings that are placed within it. It is an undiscerning and unresponsive entity that can only debate or argue in the context of authorial prediction, fundamentally unable to compute that which is novel or newly presented to it. This is all to say that the written work is not capable of engaging freely in dialogue without explicit assistance. This is presented by Socrates as a fundamental facet (and weakness) of the written work, “it itself is able neither to defend nor help itself” (Plato, 275e). To utilize the vocabulary of Walter J. Ong, Socrates’ proposition will be treated as critical to the differentiation of the spoken word of primary orality and the written word of secondary orality.
This dichotomy between the dynamically responsive and the strictly static is the primary subject of analysis here, and the question of living dialogue as opposed to the written document becomes ambiguous when considering the internet. What is the operative mode of dialogue used via digital modes of communication? How do we go about theorizing speech in the world wide web?
In terms of building upon Ong’s philosophy of orality and media change, let’s look at the Gutenberg parenthesis. “The Gutenberg parenthesis idea suggests that despite its dominance, prestige and ubiquity, print-literacy is an exception in a much longer trajectory of human thought, which may be in the process of restoring earlier modes of communication based on speech and instantaneity rather than space and time-delay” (Hartley, p. 207). Print-media has made secondary orality top dog in the age of modernity, but the internet is offering a challenge to that dominance.
What is of interest is that within the assertion of the Gutenberg parenthesis is an important detail on the technical side of affairs. To assume the consumer facing culture of networked interaction to be representative of a shift in the history of the oral tradition is one thing; to suggest that the traditional printing-press driven tradition of secondary orality is coming to an end is salient. However, what must also be considered is the ontology of the systems that predicate those cultural events; what must be considered is that the computer itself is, first and foremost, a written document.
To clarify this, the concept of a ‘finite-state machine’ is necessary to adumbrate. The finite-state machine is an abstraction of computation that operates under the principle of a machine that has a limited number of ‘states’ in which it can exist. The proverbial example of a finite state machine is a turnstile with two states, open where visitors can pass freely through, and closed when visitors are prevented from passing. This is usually accompanied by a clause or conditional aspect of the machine that determines when it can be in one state versus another (Koshy, 2004, p. 762).
The important thing to understand is that finite state machines are schematics, static abstractions of machines exchanged between developers and engineers, which are usually viewed as literal, materially written documents before being implemented into an actual technological instance of the design. By that notion alone, they are partially guilty of Socrates’ charge against written letters by being in the form of letters for a large part of their development and conceptualization. But beyond that, even in the architecture of the actual machines lies a sort of written documentation. Computers in themselves are finite state machines, which is especially evident when looking at the firmware that acts as the middleman between hardware and software. While not literally written down on paper at all times, the design of firmware is a strict schematic that exists frozen in the material instances of the technology and among the collective agreement of its developers. Its design relies on an agreed written set of propositions and theories embodied within the pins of the central processing unit.
A good example of this can be found in the concept of microcode. In 1951, the concept of microcode was first theorized in the University of Manchester by Maurice Wilkes. The issue that needed to be solved was simple. The full computer as an abstraction was too complicated an idea at the time to be implemented in any actual technology. Computers are meant to do a lot of stuff, and machines as physical objects have a hard time keeping up with that ideal. So, middleman was devised to resolve the conflict. Simple logical structures ended up being the abstraction that could create genuinely reliable machines in material implementation, which would then manage the more complex capacities via some smartly chosen heuristics. Even in modern implementations of this architecture, the design philosophy stays the same with minimizing complexity and maximizing simple, discrete functionality (Kent et al., 1993, p. 36). Even today the theory behind microcode is ubiquitous, and to see microcode in a machine is to see that theory written down.
Because of this “systematic and orderly approach to designing the control section of any computing system” (Kent et al., 1993, p. 34) the resulting first step of the computer is unchanging. It is self-evident architecture that expresses itself and its function unambiguously. Most importantly, it lacks the dynamic, free-flow capacity for state-change that is associated with complex software, even if it does interface with that complexity. It cannot change and it cannot be changed. In Socrates’ words, “they always indicate only one and the same thing” (Plato, 275e).
The point of criticality is here. The computer, the conduit of the supposed resurgence of new orality, is a written abstraction that must be interfaced with in order to access said orality. This culture of orality cannot exist without machines that at the fundamental level highly dynamic written documents that selectively show content based on that writing. Computation is not a spontaneous phenomenon, and its development as technology is one that is cemented in written abstraction and collectively authored by developers, engineers, and mathematicians.
The original question of orality of the internet becomes more complex to unfurl, how dynamic speech in the vein of old orality can arise from an apparatus that is on the level of firmware, a finite-state machine, and a self-evident documentation. Digital discourse, no matter how dynamic, spontaneous, or temporally connected, must always be sent to the instruction set architecture of the CPU, an abstraction written and read by the computer scientists responsible for its creation. How is orality possible when predicated on a written document in order to be performed?
References
Hartley, J. (2012). After Ongism: The evolution of networked intelligence. In Ong, W.J. & Hartley, J. (Eds.), Orality and Literacy: The technologizing of the word (pp. 205-221), Routledge.
Kent, A., Williams, J. G., Hall, C. M., & Kent, R. (Eds.). (1993). Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology. Marcel Dekker.
Koshy, T. (2004). Discrete Mathematics with Applications. Elsevier Academic Press.
Plato. Phaedrus. (G. Grewal, Trans.).