Verba manent: the buried orality of digital communication

In assessing the impact of comments and, more generally, of digital conversation, almost all are concerned to investigate the adjective: the appearance, the digitality. This often happens because we oppose a “virtual” online dialogue against a “real” dialogue when bodies are present in the same space. There are excellent reasons to believe that this dualism is ineffective, and I completely agree with them. But in particular, I find much more interesting that most of our communication has become written instead of spoken: and the fact that this takes place on digital platforms rather than analogue ones is actually secondary.

Until a few years ago, humanity had never communicated in mass through the written word. Sure, there were the letters, but it was essentially a private, one-to-one exchange. Personally, I find this aspect of paramount importance: we are witnessing a revolution that never happened before in the way we talk, share opinions, criticize and insult. On the very same platform you can have your say on anything, but also experience anything, even the most distant thing from your social niche.

All this raises a simple question: is the written word really suitable for group conversation? I emphasize that it is a neutral question from the point of view of value assessment. It does not involve any ethical (or worse, moralistic) criticism on the nature of digital writing, comments on the internet, the social web and so on: it just tries to evaluate their effectiveness in purely structural terms. After all, we have adopted this mean of communication with extraordinary rapidity and naturalness; and the fact that it has enhanced our capacity and extent of conversation is no doubt. But perhaps all this speed now requires a small step back.

I would start investigating the misunderstanding between orality and digital writing. As it has already been pointed out, many people write on social media or public comments on a post or article as if their words disappear a few moments later: taking them like they were “half written and half spoken”. (Hence also the constant comparisons of social media with the square, place-metaphor par excellence of discursive exchange). This misconception is interesting for two reasons.

First, from a psychological point of view it narrows the critical distance which is usually inherent between writing and the “emotion of the moment”. Even in the most basic cases, writing requires a reworking: it is not to copy into words what I think, but to shape and transform it according to a precise logic. The kind of writing that animates the more vulgar and brutal comments on a post – an issue that everybody’s been talking for a long time – is on the contrary very similar to orality. It is rapid, unstructured; it looks really mere copy of what we have in mind (or stomach): it is something new.

Again, I’d like to underscore that this is not a judgment but rather a first attempt of analysis. Many comments and many online discussions are written following specific arguments; and not all depends on the writing but also by our being immersed in environments that require, almost by essence, an immediate response (often sarcastic or very assertive – every word must be a possible last word, a cut). Also one should consider the problem of functional illiteracy.

In short, there are many elements on the table and to limit oneself to only one would be a conceptual mistake. But the friction between the written and oral aspect of digital communication in my opinion would still exist, even in a society of perfectly literate individuals and without major social tensions. Moreover, the disembodied conversation that happen online lacks of the support of gestural expressiveness, and the pace we are used to when we dialogue – I think first of all the breaks. The written word is structurally able to cover these roles? Who knows, but it is an assumption on which rests a part of our online discussion. (And it’s no accident, in order to cope with this lack, that it hybridizes itself more and more – relying on emoticons, songs, images , etc.)

Which brings us to a second reason of interest: the use of writing as communication is underpinned by the mass illusion that its ontology is like the ontology of orality. That is, that every word and phrase, even the most terrible and aggressive, will sooner or later disappear. It is a much debated question, and in a sense it is true that every word “disappears” from a practical point of view: the incessant rhythm of update of these platforms tend to devour more or less anything. It does not concretely disappear, however, on the platforms’s servers. Any digitally written word has a degree of permanence that harshly contrasts with the way it is used. (That’s why sociologist Nathan Jurgenson was right when he urged for temporary social media – and more in general for temporary forms of digital communication. The subject is lively, also due to Google’s “forget process”, and calls for more theory and better practices. For instance, Clive Thompson on Medium has proposed some good insights in the same direction, stating that “artificial forgetting isn’t panacea. But it’s an intriguing idea, and one worth pondering more. Maybe we’d enjoy tools that encourage us not just to save things, but to get rid of them.”)

So, to wrap it up: I think that the kernel of the whole discourse on social media interaction is based on a hybrid form of communication: it’s written, but it’s constantly and unconsciously taken as oral. As I argued before, writing has never been a mean for dialogue and interaction – so it clearly shows its flaws when employed this way. Not only because it tries to replicate via chirography the forms of answer&questions and “light speech” typical of orality, but also because it implies (subtly and wrongly) that all word uttered is destined to vanish.

Still, we do know that it’s not the case: we got plenty of articles and analysis and how-to explaining us that we should be posting and tweeting carefully, because it’s not going to disappear and can come back in dreadful forms (and be material both for advertisers and states).

However, there’s a kind of unconscious drive to forget this. Think of the typical justification after a stupid comment: “Oh come on, it was just Facebook / a tweet!” But why should it be “just” that – apart from the trivial idea that social media host a lot of stupid stuff? Because it’s compared to an oral one, something that slips out in a moment of rage or excitation: now that we can write publicly as easy as we speak privately, we assume that the two are the same – but they are not, as anyone who’s seen a very awkward phrase taken back can testify.

Notably, the buried orality resurrects not only when I’m having a public dialogue but also when I’m simply stating something – because I cannot state anything on the web as I would do it alone in a room. There’s simply no empty room, in a much more specific sense than the “privacy issue”: every word, every post, every tweet is possible beginning of a discussion.

In his classical work Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong had already noticed that the print and “electronic” culture brings back some kind of “secondary orality”: I think we can fruitfully adopt this concept to explain some dynamics of digital interaction. (Both social and one-to-one, since we also treat our private emails and instant messages as oral conversations: we suppose that they will disappear once sent, just like uttered words, only because they are private – while they don’t, as the whole NSA thing has dramatically showed).

So the main issue is that social media ask us an enormous work in terms of correcting our instinctive relation towards digital expression: to remember that any time we write something using the internet we are not simply “conversing” – that our words and images will be stored, and our digital identity will be determined by them. Social media are implacable in this sense, because it’s vital for their business model to keep everything stocked. But that’s a really demanding effort – right because of the buried orality of these media. And that is why all platforms should provide options for ephemeral content, reinforcing this basic intuition and making it clear.

Verba volant, scripta manent: online, this motto looks upside down. The scripta are considered verba, and as such integrated in the communication process: volatile elements, when they are not at all.