blog entry 2/23

The hypertext link as the first new form of punctuation in centuries.

On one level, this assertion makes sense, given that the point of punctuation is ostensibly to clarify and streamline prose. An alternate definition could suggest that punctuation marks are signposts on the road of linear thought provided by prose. A period means come to a full stop before continuing, a comma signifies a brief pause, etc. A third possible definition suggests that punctuation marks are what truly give speech its defining emphasis. Everybody is familiar with the scene from Anchorman in which Will Ferrell's character delivers his signature line as a question instead of a statement ("I'm...Ron Burgundy?) because of an errant question mark at the end of the Teleprompter. Are words so bankrupt of meaning that we desperately need punctuation marks to signify strong emotion?

By keeping all of these in mind, I am forced to disagree with the claim that the hypertext link is the newest form of punctuation mark. Firstly, hyperlinks do not streamline or clarify prose. Their inclusion in online articles is mainly for additional information not deemed relevant enough to be included in the main text of the article. Hyperlinks may be informative, but by clicking on one every two to three words (as in a Wikipedia page), the flow of information is not augmented but stilted by having the brain be forced to digest new and unrelated pieces of information in the middle of each sentence.

Hyperlinks do not offer clues into the meaning of prose. Although they may seek to illuminate information contained within the main body of text, it is safe to assume that if this information was relevant in the first place, it would have been included in the text. This is akin to forcing a magazine reader to skip from page to page 20 to 30 times in the middle of a 5 to 6 page article.

Response 2/16

"Each new literacy technology begins with a restricted communications function and is available only to a small number of initiates."
This is the opening stage of literacy technology, according to Dennis Baron. Consider that before Gutenberg, the only class able to read and write were the wealthy educated elite and the clergy (which is why Baron refers to this group as the 'priestly class'). Baron uses the pencil to illustrate his point, claiming that before it gained such prominence as to be ubiquitous, the pencil was actually a highly refined and developed piece of literacy technology whose duplication by a hobbyist or layperson would be impossible.
Walter Ong's claim is that the basic nature of all speech is oral. This claim is backed up with the statistics I cited in my previous post, and this could lead some to the conclusion that this claim invalidates Baron's stages, since all communication is orally based and therefore egalitarian in nature.
However, Ong's argument does not necessarily extend to communication that exists for a purpose beyond communication. Graffiti as an art form, for example, closely follows Baron's stages: it experienced a rise from vandalism to legitimized art form thanks to the likes of artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Shepard Fairey.
The extension of these ideas to technological literacy techniques such as blogging and texting does not invalidate them, but it weakens them. While both may have started in relative obscurity, one could not claim that texting was originally the domain of a 'priestly class' or that blogging was confined to the Ivory Towers of the higher learned.

Response to "Orality and Literacy"

Walter Ong's text on the relationship of the spoken word to that of the written is a dense book. But throughout the many subjects Ong discusses tangential to orality and literacy, none is so vital as his argument for the primacy of orality to the written word. I found the following statistics presented as part of Ong's argument to be intensely interesting:

Of all the thousands of languages that have been spoken during the course of recorded history, only 106 of them have been committed to writing advanced enough to produce literature.

and

Of approximately 3,000 languages spoken currently in the world, only 78 have produced literature.

What does this mean to us discussing writing? Are we to approach the languages that have developed literature with praise and the solely oral languages with scorn? Does the fact that a language has been committed to writing somehow gain it leverage in its 'validity' as a language? The answer that Ong gives us, and the correct one, is a resounding no, as "The basic orality of language is permanent".

This concept is also interesting when one considers its applications to music.
Oral tradition is, was and always will be a larger part of music than notation. There are numerous example of this, spanning multiple genres of music. Take, for example, the folk songs and 'murder ballads' of the Appalachian region. These ballads are Scottish and English in origin, yet have been passed down though generations solely by oral tradition. It was not until ethnomusicologists like Harry Smith, Alan Lomax, and others began swarming into the hills of Appalachia and transcribing these ballads that they were ever codified. I remember seeing a performance by a ballad singer, and she said that out of the hundred or so ballads she knew by heart, the ones that were easiest for her to call to memory were the ones taught to her by family members, orally, before she had ever begun to learn any codified method of singing or begun to read notated music.

The same is true of instrumentalists, as well. Jazz pioneer and trumpeter Louis Armstrong used the melody of a given song as a guidepoint for improvisation, keeping track of the chord changes of the song by continually recititing the melody in his head as he played. This method of ear training is all that existed for early jazz musicians; no notated system of jazz education existed until the later half of the 20th century. Jazz players were educated by recordings, pulling melodic lines from records and learning the ins and outs of chord changes only by repetitive listening and singing.

It is slightly humbling for those of us involved in the business of writing to think that our finely honed craft is and always will be inferior to a well-told story, or that an ungodly expensive education in music could be easily replaced by a couple of records and a good musical ear, but these are the simple truths that history has taught us. Although writing lends our thoughts permanence, and greatly decreases the difficulty inherent in certain tasks, time and time again it has been proven that the most effective form of communication and art is simply talking and listening to one another.

Helvetica freewrite

It’s not so much that you begin to notice text, an act akin to noticing air. Rather than the ‘what’, which is text, you begin to notice the ‘how’. How it’s displayed, arranged, formatted, what the company is attempting to get you to notice with the text. It’s very elementary at times, such as when you’re in an area where the businesses may not all have the funds to drop on a big name graphic designer to play with their logo. You begin to notice how ‘Main Street’ businesses (ie the ones that are part and parcel to any small town experience) follow a sort of cleaner, deliberate look, often cultivated through the use of Helvetica. Then you’ll get into the city and see how the clean, deliberate lines of text that were formerly thought to connote professionalism are now wrapped around some anorexcic model in an American Apparel ad. Or you’ll see how the formatting of something bland like Helvetica into a longer, skinnier font reduced to outlines will look trendy and european.
Last night I went through my vinyl collection, in part mourning how the advent of the CD drastically reduced the space available for sweet drawings and photographs availalble on album covers and in part looking for texts to analyze. My favorite examples were the cover of American Beauty by the Grateful Dead, Bitches Brew by Miles Davis, and Abraxas by Carlos Santana. Now, aside from all being the product of the same sort of 60’s esque cultural zeitgeist (I am approximating; Bitches Brew came out in 1969, Abraxas in 1970, and American Beauty in 1972), they all feature an interesting study of text. American Beauty is fascinating because it epitomizes the 60’s psychaedelic obsession with ‘coding’ text. Psychaedelic artists were obsessed with forcing words into bizarre shapes, or creating bubbles of color that were actually words or hidden messages. The words ‘American Beauty’ on the cover of the album are a perfect example of this; they are so ornate and overly gilded that they appear to read either ‘American Beauty’ (the name of the album) or ‘American Reality’ (not the name of the album). This is possibly an example of sociopolitical commentary on the idea of beauty as reality, but more likely the artist being a huge fan of acid. Either way, it’s cool to look at.

Abraxas and Bitches Brew are both notable because of their jaw-droppingly awesome, wraparound gatefold album art, done by the same artist, Mati Klarwein. I like thinking about these albums in terms of text because, divorced of the text that accompanies them, they're pretty much the same. You've got incredibly dense, vibrant colors, complicated images, and women in various stages of undress. Klarwein's work was in vogue for much of the 60's and 70's, with his work being used for album covers by other musicians working in both the jazz and rock idioms.
BUT ANYWAY the point is to look at the text on these two albums. Miles Davis' album is afforded a clean, modern style of text, suiting both his reputation as an esoteric, misanthropic genius and the albums' groundbreaking music (Davis was well aware of this, he subtitled the album "Direction in Music by Miles Davis"). The matchup of futuristic text and bizarre tribal imagery sums up Davis' entire essence of contradiction: constantly moving ahead in music while remaining firmly attached to his roots in the only form of indigenous American music: jazz.
Abraxas, conversely, features weirdly ornate text that looks reminiscent of Czech artist Alphonse Mucha's work in the Art Nouveau movement. Santana is a well documented religious fanatic: he claims, among other things, to have spoken to the Metatron (the voice of God) and Jesus himself. Therefore, the text that is used for his name and the album's title suddenly draws the bizarre image into context. It no longer seems quite so weird and vaguely pornographic, but rather begins to resemble a drawing from the Rubiyayat of Omar Khayyam or even from a medieval tapestry. This perfectly suits Santana's music, which is very often meandering and boring, until a journalist affixes the adjective "spiritual" to Santana's music, which somehow always justifies long winded, pseudo-latin jazz guitar solos. The text lends credence to the overblown imagery in the same way Santana's well-documented spirtuality somehow justifies his fifteen minute guitar noodlings and collaborations with idiots like P.O.D. and that goateed hammerhead from Nickelback.