Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind

For Book-readers Only

For Book-readers Only A Local Disclaimer This node was created to serve as one possible introduction to (one of several avenues into) Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind, the book associated with the Pathways Project. For that purpose it emphasizes the disorientation necessarily involved in abandoning the default medium of the book in order to grasp the dynamics of alternative media—specifically OT and IT. As such, it explains how tAgora-speak (tAgora) doesn’t and can’t translate to the eAgora (eAgora). The Book in Your Hands You’ve picked up this book, gently cradling it in your hands as you’ve done so many times throughout your life in so many different situations. It’s a cozy, familiar action, essentially a reflex, as you prepare to set sail through the smooth, silent seas of letters, words, lines, paragraphs, pages, and chapters. Everything lies before you in expectable sequence, reassuringly formatted and configured. Even the artifact itself comes complete with trusty features—a title embedded in an eye-catching design; a back-cover blurb to summarize the argument; the soft, cool feel of the pages as you turn them one by one. In ways that you don’t consciously register, the book provides a powerful and uniquely welcome frame of reference (Texts and Intertextuality). You’re ensconced on the sofa, the light’s adjusted, your cup of tea’s in place, peace reigns. You’re about to reenter a world apart, a world you’ve visited before and long to revisit. Let the Reader Beware Comfortable, then? Well, caveat lector: let the reader beware! This particular book doesn’t fit that tried-and-true mold; in fact, it seeks to expose the mold as an ideology we’ve adopted (Ideology of the Text), a tacit compromise we’ve forged with a much messier and more complex reality. For that reason it’s a book more likely to enervate than entertain, at least until you get used to how it works (Getting Started). Instead of the dependable calm that proceeds from opening the dependably put-together artifact, what awaits you is, frankly, an unsettling experience. You may undergo a kind of culture shock, not so different from the disorientation we feel when we’re suddenly immersed in a foreign society with language and customs far from our own (Culture Shock). And no apologies: Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind is actively intended to generate just that kind of disquiet and dissonance. Why? Because we’ll be doing nothing less fundamental than challenging the default medium of the linear book and page and all that they entail. We’ll be addressing the very nature of text (Reading Backwards) and asking whether that’s all there is to communication. Worse yet, perhaps, we’ll be finding that there is indeed much, much more that we’ve made a cultural habit of ignoring or suppressing. We’ll learn that there are large, complex, wholly viable, alternative worlds of media-technology (Agora Correspondences) out there—if only we’re willing to explore, to think outside the usual, culturally constructed categories. We’ll learn that oral tradition and Internet technology support thinking and creating and communicating in ways that books can’t match. And we’ll find that OT and IT work in strikingly similar fashion, offering us networks to navigate, webs of potentials that we will be in a position to activate. And that won’t be a comfortable experience, at least initially. Not at all. A Way Out . . . If You Want One Too much to ask? Well, there’s a way out, of course, a strategy to avoid the discomfort (Agoraphobia). We can simply choose not to think outside the book— not to jump off the dock—and thus avoid the reshuffling of our cognitive categories that the Pathways Project demands. The sun will still rise in the east and set in the west, the twin illusions of object (Illusion of Object) and stasis (Illusion of Stasis) will remain (artificially) in force, and our hard-won and desperately held convictions about the certainty, permanence, and primacy of the book and page will rest undisturbed. And perhaps there’s a reasonable argument for doing just that. Having labored since Gutenberg to convert knowledge, art, and ideas to an item-based economy (Accuracy), are we now to throw away centuries of hard-won victories? 2 . For Book-readers Only [18.219.22.169] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...