M.E Monday #2

So today's M.E. Monday is proudly brought to you by Walter Ong:

The changes in today's sensorium as a whole have been too complex for our present powers of description, but regarding the fortunes of the word as such one fact is especially noteworthy: the new age into which we have entered has stepped up the oral and aural. Voice, muted by script and print, has come newly alive (The Presence of the Word, 1967).



It's kind of amazing to see the foresight in this comment. To have been able to see that voice would overtake print even before we had the technology and devices for all of us to so easily capture and create audio visual content  is quite astounding.

But the thing that really stands out to me in particular is how Ong could see that voice was to come newly alive. Ong understood that the introduction of new medium - what he is referring to by today's sensorium  - even with a bias towards oral and aural, would not return us to a pre-print type of orality. Instead, we have entered into an age that is returning to the primacy of oral and aural for communication, but the visual remains not in script and print, but in the visual of video. And this means we need to know how to communicate with more than just words. But more than that, it means that the sharpest ideas are no longer necessarily being hidden away (muted by script and print) in books.

Why not share a link to a great idea you've found in an audio/visual medium in the comments below.