Oral Culture and Your Local Library

I joined my local branch of the Dallas Library last November so I could get my hands on some information about my new dog. After two trips I called it quits. They did not have much useful information, the hours were inconvenient, and I could find everything I needed online. Without late fess. 24 hours a day. I am not the only one fed up with traditional libraries, most of the people I know have not stepped into a library in years. Why would they, when a world of information is right at their fingertips through the world wide web?

Is the library going to be another casualty of the digital age, falling to the way side like so many newspapers and record stores before it? The answer, of course, is yes. Or maybe no. According to John D. Sutter's CNN article, libraries may have a future, with or without books. Like any other piece of technology, the written word has to change with the times or it becomes obsolete. As a source for knowledge and free information, the Library as we know it is likely to soon become extinct. However, some are changing with the times.

Librarians realize that the "one way flow of information from book to patron isn't good enough anymore. (Sutter)." The same frustration with the unchanging nature of books is expressed in Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy" when he says,

"a written text is basically unresponsive. If you ask a person to explain his or her statement, you can get an explanation; if you ask a text, you get nothing back, except the same, often stupid words which called for your question in the first place (79)."

According to Sutter, many forward-thinking libraries are solving this problem by beginning to blog and tweet about what is going on in their neighborhoods as well as offer digital, non-book services like video, gaming, and music labs. This is just they type of change that Marshall McLuhan called for in his 1969 Playboy interview. Forty years ago, he saw the change coming when he said,

"Book learning is no longer sufficient in any subject; the children all say now, 'Let's talk Spanish,' or 'Let the Bard be heard,' reflecting their rejection of the old sterile system where education begins and ends in a book."

By meeting these needs though turning themselves into community gathering centers where people can debate ideas and making stories come alive by acting them out and recording them, modernized libraries are in some ways returning to oral culture roots.

But, are the values of oral or preliterate culture better than bookish, literate culture? In preliterate, oral culture, events were remembered and agreed upon through collective consciousness and "customary law, trimmed of material no longer in use, was automatically always up to date and thus youthful (Ong, 98)." They did not consult a written, unchanging book, they consulted each other. These days, some people would say that we remember too much through the printed word. With the removal of the physical book, a more interactive society can happen. Although the traditional function of a library may be challenged, the digital age may be able to use new media to "retribalize" society. Theorists like McLuhan believed that “Print centralizes socially and fragments physically, whereas electronic media bring man together in a tribal village that is a rich and creative mix, where there is actually more room for creative diversity than within the homogenized mass urban society of Western man (Playboy).” He believed that electronic media could bring the world together in a similar way that printed media had torn it apart. However, in some ways, printed media has brought the world together for thousands of years, allowing them to communicate with each other, even if they do not speak the same “mother tongue,” though Learned Latin.

According to Ong, “Without Learned Latin, it appears that modern science would have got underway with greater difficulty, if it had gotten under way at all. Modern science grew in Latin soil, for philosophers and scientists through the time of Isaac Newton commonly both wrote and did their abstract thinking in Latin (114).” So without Learned (written) Latin, the world might very well still be in the dark ages, scientifically, and much more segregated socially. The thinkers of the world were able to consult the same texts to convey and discover information in a way that was not possible though other spoken or written word. Through new media, this type of communication without boundaries is once again available, but on a much larger scale.

Although some level of affluency is needed to own new technology, access to it is free and becoming much more available through forward thinking libraries. So, if you walk into your local library branch in the next few years and see that although it lacks books, it’s got a great interactive media lab, and discussion forum, don’t be surprised. Just summon your inner tribes man and join in.

And tweet me. Maybe then I’ll give the library a chance again. If it’s open.