Visual & Oral Cultures
How we got it
It is a matter of Reality Perception which revolves around point of view.
On a broad sense the point of view can be developed from a visual space, vwhich will generate a print visual culture or an acoustic space which will general an acoustic culture.
Visual space
Visual space, as Richard
Cavell explains, is not space filled with visuals or images, it is not
the contemporary mediascape, but instead it is space that is easily demarcated
with vision, it is space that is highly regular (like the standard printed page),
and it tends to be static. One way to understand McLuhan's famous formulation,
"the medium is the message," is to understand that each medium 'impose[s]
its own spatial assumptions and structures' on consumers (70 in Cavell), thus
in an era dominated by the printed word, the dominant conception of space was
a visual one. But, as Cavell notes, "Visual space was only one kind of
space, and as electronic media brought the other senses back into analogical
interrelationship, other sorts of spaces would come (back) into being, spaces
that would be dynamic and interactive" (70).
Just as visual space is not filled with visual elements, but instead refers
to the dominant means of perceiving space, acoustic space is not necessarily
filled with sound. Acoustic space tends to be perceived by both the ear and
the eye, but more importantly, the qualities of the space, therefore, tend to
be as Cavell says, interactive and dynamic. In Cavell's reading of The Gutenberg
Galaxy, McLuhan's second book, he sees McLuhan emphasizing that even non-verbal
communication, like a mosaic, can be understood as oral or acoustic, because
of its many resonances, its piling up and juxtaposing of images, its "allatonceness"
(55). We generally recognize that email, discussion board text, weblog text,
reads more like speech than finished prose, but in addition to those formal
qualities, the text is being produced and consumed in spaces that emphasize
exchange. Cavell states clearly in his preface that the first part of the book
"argues for the importance of understanding acoustic space as a hybrid
of oral and literate modalities" (xiv). The word is not dead, and visual
space is not vanquished, but both are being increasingly pushed aside by communication
with images and spaces that are formed through social interaction. As educators,
we know intuitively that the kind of spaces we create – from our paper
or hypertext syllabi, our arrangement of the classroom, our structuring of activities
– will send clear messages about authority, knowledge, power, and the rules
of conduct for communication to our students.
Acoustic space
“The key characteristic of acoustic space is that it engages multiple senses at the same time. It does not demand that objects be dissected to be understood; rather, the multiple parts co-exist simultaneously. To understand acoustic space, you must perceive all of it, not focus on one part. In other words, acoustic space demands that you apprehend figure and ground simultaneously, that the senses work together. McLuhan believed that oral cultures existed in acoustic space since their primary mode of communicating was speech.”