Panel 4 – Oral Tradition

I have a lot of unusual background traits that made me think about signing up for a panel about Oral Tradition:

• I spent several years working as a legal transcriptionist dealing with audio such as witness interviews, first responder recordings, and psychological exams.
• I grew up around Polynesian people who come from a tradition with no written language, where it’s common and routine to memorize long stories and recitations. 
•  I’ve spent much of my life working with multilingual people, and although I am monolingual myself, I really enjoy texting with people who don’t speak my language using autotranslate. 
• I just lost my audiobook virginity with Jeff Hays’ rendition of Dungeon Crawler Carl, which I have already read in the text version. 
• The last book I published, Star Language, involved a multilingual girl who ends up being official translator for the alien invasion. 

I am primarily text-based. I was a precocious reader and have always been more of a bookworm. I went through a cinema nerd phase but I don’t really like to watch video, I have never listened to a podcast, and I only get through a handful of movies every year. I like music of various types, and I also really cherish my urban version of silence, where I can hear the constant flow of traffic and other background but my blackout curtains keep the overall decibel level low.  Depending on how busy I am at work, sometimes I might go for a week or so without talking to anyone (although I’m probably texting and emailing). 

In fact, I’ve noticed that when I don’t speak very much, I tend to occasionally have difficulties with things like aphasia, and occasionally forgetting my own native language, and since this is my first panel, I’ve been blathering with anyone I can find to get my loquacious muscle toned up, so hopefully I won’t forget any important words as I shift from eyeball mode to voice mode. 

I’ve noticed the world around me gradually shifting from being text-based to relying more on video and audio, while text becomes the place where you run into unpleasantries like trolls, catfishers, people who post those soppy AI glurge stories. Some of my discussion groups have completely mutated into Tik Tok and Instagram videos, and my job tends to use videos for training and continuing ed. Audiobooks are just as popular as print books, and if Dungeon Crawler Carl is any example, they’re lots of fun.

I’ve been hearing people say that maybe literacy was a fluke, and perhaps the future belongs to speech. However, we’re not really reversing back into oral tradition because we can record speech, which saves us from having to memorize entire books, like in Fahrenheit 451. Most people do seem to prefer speech over text, aside from a few weirdos like me, and text-based composition might end up being an artisan skill, like maintaining wooden ships, or writing in cursive.

In an oral culture with no way of recording language, people use memory tricks to help them stuff pages of information into their minds. Polynesians would often anchor everything to a geneology. Westerners had a tradition known as “memory palaces,” where you imagine yourself filing away each new bit of information in your own imaginary castle, so you can access it later. I knew a hippie who had a memory spaceship where he would go when he meditated.

But now we have an active spoken-word-based culture, plus we can record it. We no longer have the advanced memory training practices required by those who seek to master knowledge in a world without books, so we’re more like Oral Tradition 2.0: The Sequel. 

Some of my other panels touch upon neurology – neurodiversity, and keeping your brain healthy. I suspect a preference for speech over text is another one of those things that is more about neurology than conditioning, since hardly any of us grew up in an oral culture, but a bunch of us decided to create one the moment technology made it possible, and lots of others decided to follow. 

I don’t think oral culture will “replace” written culture, in the sense that every human suddenly develops a preference for it. There will always be bibliophiles, and people with impaired hearing, and people who tend to zone out when people are droning on and on until they start to sound like the teachers in Charlie Brown cartoons. 

But I can see a day when people can get through college without reading, or writing. And I don’t think that’s something to be alarmed about. Not everyone has to be bookish. Diversity and inclusion extend to neurodiversity. 

Just as long as text-based people like myself can still fling walls of text at each other (like this one) I’ll be fine.