Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind by John Miles Foley (review)

John Miles Foley’s Oral Tradition and the Internet is an incredibly ambitious work by an incredibly ambitious scholar. Published shortly after his untimely passing in 2012, this book and website represent Foley’s elegant attempt to mirror in published form the ideas he argues for in the work. In this respect, as well as several others, this is a difficult piece to capture in a review, simply because it is dramatically unlike a standard work of published scholarship both in form and content.

Foley’s basic contentions in the piece are that there are “fundamental similarities and correspondences between humankind’s oldest and newest thought-technologies: oral tradition and the Internet,” that “[d]espite superficial differences, both technologies are radically alike in depending not on static products but rather on continuous processes,” and that in “contrast to the fixed spatial organization of the page and book, the technologies of oral tradition and the Internet mime the way we think by processing along pathways within a network” (p. 5). It is this final notion Foley sought to mirror both in the structure of the printed book and the open-access website (http://www.pathwaysproject.org), which he collectively refers to as “The Pathways Project.” Accordingly, taking a network rather than linear structure in both, he organizes the printed work not as a progression through a pre-structured narrative route, but rather as a series of “nodes” arranged arbitrarily in alphabetical order. This arbitrary organization in the printed text is intended to indicate the correspondence between the structure of the book and the structure of the website, 65 percent of which is reproduced in the printed book, and to encourage readers to navigate the printed work, which Foley calls a “morphing book,” in a manner similar to the way a user might move through a page of hypertext.

Foley is, of course, not the first writer to attempt to simulate hypertext navigation in a printed work. In fact, as Robert Glenn Howard recently noted in his chapter in Folk Culture in the Digital Age (Utah State University Press, 2012:27), the concept of hypertext itself was first formulated in a printed form, and only later translated into electronic form with the development of HTML. Yet, Foley’s use of this structure is particularly striking perhaps both because hypertext is now so deeply interwoven with the communicative environment of the Internet and because it seems like old news. Indeed, there is a certain extent to which Foley’s work initially has the latter feel, employing as it does a great deal of terminology that superficially corresponds to the “Web 1.0” environment of the late 1990s. Still, this work is not simply an example of the common disjunction between the rapid speed of technological change and the methodical pace of scholarly publishing. Indeed, at its core, this work is not so much concerned with any specific device or platform as it is with the fundamental “ideologies” of communicative media that structure how we interact with them.

In that vein, Foley defines three distinct “agora” or “verbal marketplaces” that correspond to the three broad communicative technologies he examines. He dubs these the “oAgora” (oral marketplace), “tAgora” (textual marketplace), and “eAgora” (electronic marketplace) (pp. 40–1). At many points throughout the work, Foley returns to these core divisions to offer both a detailed critique of the “Ideology of the Text” and an extensive examination of the “IT-OT parallels” (p. 56). With regard to the former, Foley notes that one of the key features of the “Ideology of the Text” is that the communicative assumptions it encodes have become naturalized in modernity to such a degree that we are not typically able to expose these assumptions without a sustained effort (pp. 36–8). For instance, Foley argues that the “conviction that texts are objective, tangible, and static” has become a fundamental tenet in the “tReligion” that...