Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002.
by
Martin M. Jacobsen, Ph.D.
Adapted from "Preface" (p. ix)
Literacy theorist Walter Ong compares orality and
literacy as distinct worldviews. He sees oral rhetoric as embodied,
concrete,
aggregative and communal. The rhetoric of literate cultures, however,
is
disembodied, abstract, hierarchical, and individual in focus. This
dissertation
postulates a theory of cyberdiscursivity, which holds that the more
instantaneous,
widespread, and individual discursive practices inherent in
computer-mediated
communication (CMC) change the production, use, and conceptualization
of
texts in ways similar to those above, rendering the familiar standards
of print texuality only tangentially applicable to cybertexts.
Chapter I conceptualizes cyberdiscursivity by
offering
a history of discourse focusing on the orality/literacy question via
rhetorical
and critical theory. The next four chapters recount Ong's
characteristics
of orality and literacy and then extend Ong's elements of oral and
literate
cultures to CMC culture. First, where oral rhetoric is embodied and
literacy
is disembodied, a cyberdiscursive rhetoric is
virtual, characterized
by remotely centered interactivity and instantaneousness. The next
chapter
details how the concrete rhetoric of orality and abstract rhetoric of
literacy
become dynamic in cyberdiscursivity via the continuous,
productive
nature created by virtuality and user agency. The subject of Chapter IV
is the way in which oral rhetoric's aggregative structure and
literacy's
hierarchical structure give way to an emergent structure in
CMC,
pieced together by a user who does not recognize a structure until it
develops
before her through a random choice of fragments which seldom, if ever,
remain cohesive, and which usually become impossible to trace.
The
fifth chapter demonstrates how the communal nature of oral rhetoric and
the individual nature of literacy move toward an idiosyncratic rhetoric
in which reader/user agency transforms the textual experience into an
epistemologically
challenging game which shatters rules as basic to print texts as one
word
following another. These elements underlying Chapters II-V are
abstracted
in a table below. A conclusions chapter then combines the
elements
of cyberdiscursivity into a theoretical whole, the purpose of which is
to provide a viewpoint for the future evaluation of CMC as a
controlling
cultural medium.
Orality | Literacy | Cyberdiscursivity |
Embodied | Disembodied | Virtual |
Concrete | Abstract | Dynamic |
Aggregative | Hierarchical | Emergent |
Communal | Individual | Idiosyncratic |
Table 1: Elements of Orality, Literacy, and Cyberdiscursivity (p.
8)