Oral Tradition and the Internet

by Foley, John Miles

• ISBN13: 9780252078699
• ISBN10: 0252078691
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-08-16
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

The major purpose of this book is to illustrate and explain the fundamental similarities and correspondences between humankind's oldest and newest thought-technologies: oral tradition and the Internet. Despite superficial differences, both technologies are radically alike in depending not on static products but rather on continuous processes, not on "What?" but on "How do I get there?" In contrast to the fixed spatial organization of the page and book, the technologies of oral tradition and the Internet mime the way we think by processing along pathways within a network. In both media it's pathways--not things--that matter. To illustrate these ideas, this volume is designed as a "morphing book," a collection of linked nodes that can be read in innumerable different ways. Doing nothing less fundamental than challenging the default medium of the linear book and page and all that they entail,Oral Tradition and the Internetshows readers that there are large, complex, wholly viable, alternative worlds of media-technology out there--if only they are willing to explore, to think outside the usual, culturally constructed categories. This "brick-and-mortar" book exists as an extension of The Pathways Project (http://pathwaysproject.org), an open-access online suite of chapter-nodes, linked websites, and multimedia all dedicated to exploring and demonstrating the dynamic relationship between oral tradition and Internet technology

Author Biography

John Miles Foley was William H. Byler Chair in the Humanities, Curators' Professor of Classical Studies and English, and the director of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri at Columbia. He was the author or editor of twenty books, including How to Read an Oral Poem.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
For Book-readers Only	p. 1
Home Page	p. 5
Getting Started	p. 7
Disclaimer	p. 17
Book versus Website	p. 21
Response	p. 23
Linkmaps	p. 29
Nodes in Alphabetical Order	p. 31
A Foot in Each World	p. 33
Accuracy	p. 36
Agora As Verbal Marketplace	p. 40
Agora Correspondences	p. 41
Agoraphobia	p. 41
Arena of Oral Tradition	p. 43
Arena of the Text	p. 45
Arena of the Web	p. 47
Audience Critique	p. 49
Bellerophon and His Tablet	p. 50
Citizenship in Multiple Agoras	p. 51
Cloud and Tradition	p. 55
Contingency	p. 60
Culture As Network	p. 66
Culture Shock	p. 70
Distributed Authorship	p. 74
Don't Trust Everything You Read in Books	p. 77
eAgora	p. 79
eCompanions	p. 95
eEditions	p. 96
ePathways	p. 96
eWords	p. 98
Excavating an Epic	p. 100
Freezing Wikipedia	p. 103
Getting Published or Getting Sequestered	p. 106
Homo Sapiens' Calendar Year	p. 113
How to Build a Book	p. 115
Ideology of the Text	p. 117
Illusion of Object	p. 125
Illusion of Stasis	p. 127
Impossibility of tPathways	p. 130
In the Public Domain	p. 131
Indigestible Words	p. 133
Just the Facts	p. 135
Leapfrogging the Text	p. 138
Misnavigation	p. 142
Morphing Book	p. 146
Museum of Verbal Art	p. 149
Not So Willy-nilly	p. 163
oAgora	p. 165
Online with OT	p. 179
oPathways	p. 181
Owning versus Sharing	p. 182
oWords	p. 185
Polytaxis	p. 187
Proverbs	p. 191
Reading Backwards	p. 195
Real-time versus Asynchronous	p. 199
Reality Remains in Play	p. 203
Recur Not Repeat	p. 208
Remix	p. 212
Responsible Agora-business	p. 213
Resynchronizing the Event	p. 218
Singing on the Page	p. 221
Spectrum of Texts	p. 225
Stories Are Linkmaps	p. 234
Systems versus Things	p. 237
tAgora	p. 238
Texts and Intertextuality	p. 253
Three Agoras	p. 255
tWords	p. 262
Variation within Limits	p. 263
Why Not Textualize?	p. 269
Wiki	p. 271
Further Reading	p. 273
Notes	p. 281
Index	p. 287
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