Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind

eAgora: Electronic Networks to Surf

Most fundamentally, it’s the quality of immutability, the very characteristic that we textual devotees so highly prize (Accuracy), that blocks our way. Whatever its (supposed) advantages, a commitment to (imagined) immutability deprives OT of its core identity. It guarantees distortion, precludes verisimilitude and emergence. Freeze the performance, reduce it to print and/or static files, and what happens? The life, the ongoingness, the right-now, event-centered nature that defined the performance’s most essential reality all perish without a trace. And in their place stands an artifact complete in itself and yet empty—a cenotaph, a triumph of taxidermy (Museum of Verbal Art). The moral? Oral tradition can’t be captured in texts, no matter how strong our ideological motivation. You just can’t trust an em-booked oral tradition—not least because it’s an oxymoron and a bald-faced lie. Counter-proverbs So the proverbial phrase we started with—“Don’t trust everything you read in books”—may not be so curious or mysterious a saying after all, it seems. We might even understand its subliminal message as an acknowledgment of the terrible price we unconsciously pay in doing tAgora business. It wouldn’t be the first time that a culture cloaked its objections to the reigning orthodoxy in safely coded, arm’s-length language. At any rate, in the spirit of understanding the tAgora tax on oral traditions, let’s close by indulging ourselves in a few counter-proverbs, made-up nuggets of media-wisdom whose function is to remind us of the hidden costs entailed and help us negotiate the ever-present threat of agoraphobia (Agoraphobia). In that spirit here are three freshly minted “old saws” to ponder: 1. Don’t trust living realities reduced to books. 2. Save some trust for what books naturally exclude. 3. Trust multimedia (Resynchronizing the Event) over monomedium, and systems over things. L eAgora: Electronic Networks to Surf An agora is a verbal marketplace (Agora As Verbal Marketplace)—a site for creation and exchange of knowledge, art, and ideas. The Pathways Project recognizes three agoras, or arenas for human communication (Three Agoras). This node is devoted to the IT arena, the eAgora. The true currency of exchange in the eAgora is eWords (eWords)—coded, virtual, and linked words. Not typographical prompts, but an actual, clickedon , in-context performance experienced at that moment and in that place by a present audience. You participate in the electronic marketplace via real-time, eAgora . 79 directly engaged transaction, not by swapping texts. Everything happens “in the moment”—right now, not at some convenient future time to be chosen by a detached, independent reader and forestalled until the time seems right. The eAgora event is all-consuming for webmaster and surfer alike. Why? Because in interactive format it is unmediated by texts, with nothing held at arm’s length. Agora-mirrors Before proceeding any further, let’s highlight a built-in structural comparison among the three nodes on principal media types: the oAgora, tAgora, and eAgora. From this point on—and across all three involved nodes—the section headings and organization will follow a mirroring logic. In other words, immediately below this paragraph you will find two sections entitled “Genus and species” and “Word-markets,” followed by another with the subheading of either “Public, not proprietary” or “Proprietary, not public,” depending on the agora in question. In fourth position you will encounter a brief discussion of “The evolutionary fallacy,” and so on. The purpose of this organizational strategy is to help demonstrate the comparisons and contrasts (Disclaimer) that lie at the heart of the Pathways Project. For a complete list of the inter-agora parallels, visit Agora Correspondences (Agora Correspondences). Roman agora, Athens. Photograph by DerHexer. Courtesy of Wikimedia. 80 . eAgora Genus and species The virtual landscape is awash with newly evolved species that simply can’t be understood through the default technology of the tAgora. We can speak of “pages” and “destinations” and “data,” but concentrating on what seems thinglike (and comfortably familiar) misses the point. What makes the eAgora categorically different from textual items and repositories is its ability to morph within limits (Variation within Limits) and to support navigation and cocreation by surfers, and at the same time not to foreclose on alternate possibilities (Reality Remains in Play). What matters is the network of links and ePathways (ePathways ), which distinguish systems from things (Systems versus Things). Even a...