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Comment by daotoad

4 years ago

This fits nicely with some ideas I've been working on about "Tribal Knowledge". It's going to take some thought to integrate fully. I am primarily looking at the work of Ong on orality and the distinctions he draws between oral and literal cultures.

It's not uncommon to hear the phrase used as a pejorative, with the implicit assumption that oral culture is inferior to literate culture and that tribalism == primitivism == bad and undesirable.

But I've come to believe that there are always going to be things that cannot or should not be represented in written documentation. Documentation is an artifact that must be maintained. Individual professionals and organizations spend a huge amount of energy producing, managing, and maintaining written documentation.

But how much time have we spent on oral transmission of ideas? Almost none. And that's because we dismiss it as an approach. It's seen as less than or primitive, or at best something to discourage.

But if you accept that there must always be some oral information, then ignoring the issues of how we communicate, update, and persist that orally transmitted information seems foolish. There are cultures that have more recently made the the transition from being primarily oral to literal that have not forgotten the skills needed to manage this class of knowledge.

I wonder what practices we can learn from them that we can use to improve our ability to share and communicate more effectively.

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daotoad

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gmfawcett  4 years ago

I don't know Ong's work at all. But I wonder where "lector" culture fits? If someone is reading or reciting to you, is that oral culture? or is dialogue a necessary component?

Really I'm wondering where the divide is between, "you need to talk with me to learn this", and, "you can subscribe to my channel to learn this."

  • krab  4 years ago

    I think a good lecture is always followed by a discussion. So the oral culture may be more inviting to the dialogue, even if it specifically doesn't require it.

    Vice versa, we're now contributing to the literal culture by discussion and people have been writing replies to texts forever. However, the ratio of information read to the amount of information discussed is different. It's harder to find people willing to discuss in writing a random piece of text you just read as opposed to discussing verbally what the lector just said.