Bytia volant et manent: the new textual world of audiovisual
It is usual since McLuhan’s essays to regard as different the textual and the oral world. The oral world, born with the Gutenberg press, and the electronic and audiovisual world of Tesla or Marconi.
The textual world offers stability, while the other is transitory. «Scripta manent, verba volant», said the Latin dictum. That is to say: The written remains, the spoken flies. However, McLuhan’s comparison is persuasive when refers to the oral and written world of the past, but is no longer true in the twentieth century.
The real difference between the oral and written worlds throughout history is not their visual or written nature, but that the writing text could be preserved reliably while and oral text could not be preserved. While the oral tradition offered vagueness, volatility and the impossibility of verifying, the written text offered accuracy and precision. Nobody can demonstrate if the poets who transmitted the Homeric songs had faithfully preserved them from father to son. On the contrary, written texts can be contrasted with each other and we can examine their accuracy and authenticity. Lorenzo Valla proved in 1440 that the Donation of Constantine was a fake and that the Roman emperor had never donated the city of Rome and the Roman Empire of the West to Pope Sylvester I in the year 300. Valla discover the hoax because the Donation was a written text. If the Donation to Pope had been an oral tradition, any criticism and analysis would have been impossible. That has been the actual disparity between the oral and the textual tradition for over four thousand years.
Until the 19th century, only texts were preserved, rewritten and analyzed in a more or less accurate or scientific approach, but everything that was transmitted orally disappeared forever. The reader can imagine what would happen if the written texts instead of writing on supports like paper, bamboo, parchment or stone were written on the sand of a beach or on the water. They would be as perishable as the words spoken in the air, or as the only ones that Jesus Christ wrote: “Jesus, bowed down, wrote on the ground with his finger (John 8: 3) ».Until the invention of the printing press, alteration of the texts was extremely difficult and the observations were made in the margin or in another document. A manuscript is, compared to a book printed, as celluloid compared to digital recording: expensive and difficult to handle. Manuscripts was a restraint for a free interpretation, because the text always said the same thing. The expansion of the printing press allowed that the canonical texts were stored and propagated, and in this way they favored divergent interpretations. It was his stable or permanent quality that made the textual different to the audiovisual . At least until a few decades ago.
Although McLuhan lived in the era of recorded audio-visual, he paid intense attention to the condition of electronic dissemination of sound and image but little to the fact that you could too record and store the material. He knew the films were kept in laboratories under conditions of temperature and humidity who prevented their degradation, and even that the TV channels kept their programs, but this material was so difficult to access that it was nearly inevitable to think it was not available for no reasonable study purpose. The diffusion of video systems and the development of the digital world, personal computers and the Internet has altered the panorama drastically, leading us to a conviction which, as Stuart Moulthrop says, would have astonished McLuhan:
“McLuhan saw the transforming impact of electrical technologies, but, perhaps because he did not experience the boom of the personal computer, he could not notice the new stage, the recursion to a new era of typographic literature through the syncretic medium who is the hypertext”.
But that is not the true paradox. The awesome fact is not that the textual can become audiovisual, for example, in chat messages. The genuine innovation was that the audiovisual (oral culture) has become a precise text. The viewers, who before were exposed to “narrative pressure,” can now stop an audiovisual work in substantially the same way that the reader stop to read a printed book.
Before going on, let me clear up something: the reader of a story can too be a victim of narrative pressure: he can read and read, without pausing, driven by the necessity of reaching the conclusion as soon as possible: I have found readers that they never wrote in the margins of books and that they even scolded me for doing so. Those readers performed as the listeners of books in the Middle Ages and Antiquity. Listeners were like moviegoers: they don’t stop until the conclusion.
Written texts privileged linear, hierarchic and ordered narrative in episodes and paragraphs, as well as the numerical and alphabetical order. But neither the textual is restricted to be linear, nor the oral, the audiovisual or the digital has to be non-linear. Modern computers allowed us to display the hypertextual qualities of any text and all the rich intertextuality that has always been there. But the new media showed to us that many of the differences between the textual and the audiovisual are consequence of historical accidents and, once again, maybe we confuse appearances with essences.After this clarification, we can come back to the innovation of the easy recording (and manipulation), of the oral and audiovisual worlds.
In short, the audiovisual now owns all the peculiarities of a text: it can be saved, arranged, handled, studied and send in an even richer way than any text throughout history. McLuhan predicted that the audiovisual future would make us less methodical, less qualified for discursive and logical thinking, more tribal and more foolish, but it does not have to happen tin that way. In the first place, because we have discovered that we can access the most varied contents in more complex ways, but too more direct and often more reasonable than the alphabetical or hierarchic order. The new ways of relating, tracking and archiving information allow us to discover errors of hierarchical methods, but besides combine them with associative and semantic ones.
It is true that the linear narrative form is still the preferred one, and presumably will continue to be so, because is the simplest, but this form can be found in the oral songs of a blind poet like Homer or in his textual transcription in the Odyssey, not itself oral or textual, except for specific technical details who favor memorization. Now we can listen the songs of Homer in an audiobook, but also we can go back or forward in the oral story, we can look for this word that we have not read but heard, and handle those sounds as if were a written text. On Internet pages such as TED conferences we can hear and look to audiovisual talks, but on the same screen we can read an interactive textual transcription, which allows us to search for any passage of the talk and, once found, click and listen again. This is a good illustration of the fusion of media that I described in The script of the 21st century, of the mixture that dilutes the boundaries between the oral and the written world. Eric Havelock devoted an entire book (The Muse Lean to Write) to the pivotal moment in which the Muse learned to write, when oral culture became a text, but now the Muse has besides learned to record image and sound as if it were a text.
El guión del siglo 21 (Amazon)
