Dear Virginia and colleagues, a thousand thanks for this - for many reasons, but especially two. First, you identify what in my reading is a highly influential text from 1997 that seems to come close to characterizing the critique of writing in the Phaedrus as a media panic, if not a moral panic. This is 12 years earlier than one of the texts I'm looking more closely into. Second, you make - with more detail and nuance - the points I would make about reading the dialogues, most especially in the Phaedrus, as strongly pedagogical in nature, as well as far more nuanced than the moral / media panic trope can do justice to. FWIW, the associations with and illuminations vis-a-vis remix, etc. also make good sense to me - but this will require more attention and reflection on my part. There's clearly a good paper or two in here ... hope to get to it one of these days. Best of luck with your current insanities - again, a thousand thanks and all best, - charles On 25/04/2019 22:48, Virginia Kuhn wrote:

Dear Charles, This may not be helpful but I did write a bit about Ong, Havelock, Plato and new media in a piece called "The Rhetoric of Remix" (2012, /Transformative Works and Cultures/). I've excerpted a few paragraphs from the second section below (though it's open access <https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/358>): in which I specifically speak to Plato's concerns about both writing and poetics:

[2.2] The concept of secondary orality advanced in Walter Ong's (1982) work is premised on his chronicling of the progression of oral culture to literate culture and, finally, to current secondary or residual orality that combines characteristics of each. In looking at Ong's list of features that characterize orality, we can see many overlaps with remix: "additive rather than subordinative; aggregative rather than analytic; redundant or 'copious'; conservative or traditionalist; close to the human lifeworld; agonistically toned; empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced; homeostatic; situational rather than abstract" (37–49). However, Ong's work has far more to offer to digital scholarship. In particular, his analysis of Homer and Plato can help reveal the roots of current epistemological boundaries between genres considered to be factual and those seen as fictive.

[2.3] The collectively authored and formulaic nature of Homeric epic poetry is old news; it is key to Janet Murray's (1997) notion of cyberdrama, for instance. However, the link between Homer and current conceptions of collaboratively authored narrative (or digital storytelling, as it is increasingly being referred to) is more tenuous than has been acknowledged. Milman Parry's research on Homeric extant texts in the 1930s dashed the prevailing view of Homer as a genius who single-handedly constructed masterpieces such as the /Illiad/ and the /Odyssey,/ although his work was not expanded on until about 30 years later, when Albert Lord extended Parry's research on Homer to consider its implications for performance and literature, and Eric Havelock, Ong's frequent collaborator, used it to explore speech and literacy. The difference in approach leads to differing conclusions about the boundaries between literature and rhetoric. Parry's careful analysis of the /Odyssey/ and the /Iliad/ revealed them to be highly formulaic, and as Ong explains, "The meaning of the Greek term 'rhapsodize,' /rhapsoidein,/ 'to stitch song together,' became ominous: Homer stitched together prefabricated parts. Instead of a creator, you had an assembly-line worker" (1982, 22). Immediately we can see that the current connotation of /rhapsody/ is far more romantic and poetic than its original meaning; indeed, this view of rhapsody evokes sewing and its analogy to film editing as well as to remix (as clips are stitched together), none of which have traditionally been seen as particularly creative endeavors. From a discursive view, however, these prefabricated parts are necessary when one must transmit knowledge orally; it must be repeated to be remembered and passed on to others, so formulaic thought was "essential for wisdom and effective administration" (Ong 1982, 24). In this light, Homeric epic was not the province of entertainment but of governance. These prefabricated parts also change slightly with each retelling over the centuries, and so the /Iliad/ and the /Odyssey,/ when analyzed, are shown to be a patchwork of "early and late Aeolic and Ionic peculiarities" (23) whose forms were reified during the centuries after the invention of the Greek alphabet as they were written down. It would be misguided to see Homeric poetry as consonant with the current conception of literature, which is framed as distinct from rhetoric. In Homeric times, these distinctions did not exist. It would be equally misguided to view this collective authorship as the sort of crowd-sourced democratic practice many of us hope to attain in digital space; the changes to the /Odyssey/ and the /Iliad/ took place over centuries, as is evidenced by their blend of alphabetic conventions, and these blended wordings were not accomplished by people using language, as idioms are, but by the few who had the means to write: poets and scribes working for the ruling classes. In this sense, it was a broadcast medium: it could not be interrogated, only consumed.

[2.4] Similarly, Plato is widely known for having banished the poets from his ideal Republic as well as for having condemned writing. Scholars cite passages from Plato's /Republic/ in the former case, and the/ Phaedrus/ and the/ Seventh Letter/ in the latter. For instance, in /Hamlet on the Holodeck,/ Janet Murray (1997) posits Plato's attack on Homer as merely one instantiation of the perennial fear of "every powerful new representational technology," noting that "we hear versions of the same terror in the biblical injunction against worshipping graven images; in the Homeric depiction of the alluring Sirens' songs, drawing sailors to their death; and in Plato's banishing of the poet from his republic" (18). Citing Parry and Lord, she goes on to argue: "A stirring narrative in any medium can be experienced as a virtual reality because our brains are programmed to tune into stories with an intensity that can obliterate the world around us. This siren power of narrative is what made Plato distrust the poets as a threat to the Republic" (98). For Murray, then, Plato was simply terrified by narrative and its immersive quality. This allows her to champion cyberdrama as merely an extension of older forms of literature and a universal human need for stories. However, even as current readings of ancient texts are destined to be somewhat anachronistic, certain facts are difficult to dispute. One such fact is that far from being a new form of representation, the oral structure of the Homeric epic was a centuries-old form by the time of Plato. As Ong's work reveals, it was actually the tropes of orality that, after the invention of the alphabet, no longer functioned as noetic (that is, being of the thought world, or of intelligence); instead, they called attention to themselves as mediated and dogmatic. Indeed, once these epics were written down, they essentially became obsolete. Their forms and attendant iconography, so useful for oral delivery, seem rudimentary and jingoistic when the repetition no longer served.

[2.5] In this light, Plato's derision of Homer was actually a denunciation of the outdated and counterproductive structures of knowledge transmission characterized by oral epics because their mythos blocked, rather than encouraged, the acquisition of real knowledge. The grievance was not intrinsically about narrative but rather an indictment of an inferior and ineffective example of the exteriorization of knowledge in a form that is static. Indeed, for Plato, wisdom came via a dialogic process, not from simply absorbing a text whose veracity could not be subjected to interrogation. This view is strengthened by looking at Plato's notorious attack on writing, which needs qualification, particularly because it was done /in/ writing—and, some would argue, often poetically at that.

[2.6] Plato's 30-plus dialogues did not faithfully represent an actual conversation but were instead used as epistemological and pedagogical guides, using the voice of Plato's teacher, Socrates. The/ Phaedrus,/ one of most prominent of the Socratic dialogues, is presented as the script of a conversation between Socrates and his frequent interlocutor, Phaedrus, while walking through the countryside on the outskirts of Athens. It is clearly dramatized, with characters named, although there is no narrator to intrude on or mediate the conversation. Phaedrus has just attended a speech on the nature of love, which sparks a conversation about knowledge, learning, and wisdom. When the talk turns to writing, Socrates notes, "I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting: for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question, they preserve a solemn silence" (Jowatt 2006, 278-12). As we see from this passage, the complaint is less about writing per se and more about the incomplete nature of the representation, compounded by the inability to speak back to a text, to be an interlocutor. One must simply accept what the text says without the veracity achieved by understanding the process by which it came to be, and without the ability to gauge the credibility of the author. For Plato, this process// was most important because real wisdom was deeper than its exteriorization in speech, writing, or images. In other words, the shortcomings of any form of representation can be mitigated by the ability to question, interact, and evaluate utterances. If these texts could be conversational, there is little reason to conclude that Plato would not also view them as pedagogical. Indeed, Plato himself wrote a great deal, and perhaps the naming of interlocutors in his dialogues was an early form of citation. Further, the analogy to painting is interesting, not least because visual texts have remained nondialogic until recently. Today, however, the remixer becomes an interlocutor in the digital conversation, one who can question the formal boundaries of a print-literate culture and one whose efforts often expose the process of creation.

I hope to catch up on this very interesting thread once I get past some insanity. cheers, Virginia Kuhn

On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 9:37 AM Charles M. Ess <c.m.ess@media.uio.no <mailto:c.m.ess@media.uio.no>> wrote:

Dear AoIRists,

Please be kind and patient with me, recalling that my formal academic training was in history of philosophy, German literature, and ancient Greek.  I am comparatively still a little wet around the ears with regard to media and communication studies - or so it seems in this instance.

I keep encountering discussions of moral / media panics that consistently invoke Plato's _myth_ of the invention of writing.

This seemingly standard invocation puzzles me greatly for a long list of reasons.  I include a short list below for anyone with time and interest in looking them over.

The upshot is that I'm left wondering: who - and when - introduced what has apparently become received tradition in these domains that the mythos (see "2" below) of the invention of writing in the Phaedrus is a prime or supportive example moral or media panic?

This is, as they say in administration-speak, an appreciative inquiry. I'm genuinely curious for the sake of better understanding how this trope first appeared, etc - as well as genuine worried that I may have somehow missed something that is considered elementary and obvious for those of you with academic training more directly within media and communication studies.

Many thanks in advance for any enlightenment and eludation! best, - charles ess

PS: The short list includes: 1) the account is taken (bloody and screaming) out of the context of the larger dialogue in the Phaedrus. When read within the larger context - beginning with (the young) Phaedrus' effort to impress (perhaps seduce) Socrates by memorizing a speech he has copied down on a scroll and initially tries to hide from Socrates - the mythos works much more immediately as a lightly veiled (and hence, pedagogically speaking, likely more successful) chastisement of Phaedrus' efforts at dissimulation.  By no means a wholesale critique of writing per se. 2) The account is explicitly delivered as a _mythos_ - too easily translated as a "myth." But: a _mythos_ in Plato is a technical / philosophical form, going well beyond and in some ways directly contradicting more everyday notions of "myth" as a false story; a mythos is specifically an _oral_ story, with its own set of distinctive strengths and limitations. It is often used in Plato when interlocutors, attempting to pursue a reasoned argument (logos), come to an impass. The relation between mythos and logos is hence often complementary, not contradictory. 3) It would seem very odd for an author of multiple dialogues, of sometimes staggering sophistication and literary nuance, to sincerely believe that writing is somehow an entirely suspect technology. Different from orality, certainly, as is suggested by the consistent presentation of Socrates as an oral teacher, the careful use of mythos vs. logos, etc. - but hardly an example of media / moral panic. And so on. Again: what am I missing?

Again, many thanks, - c. -- Professor in Media Studies Department of Media and Communication University of Oslo <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.hf.uio.no_imk_english_people_aca_charlees_index.html&d=DwICAg&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=oBnuKIJVqxq7Y-shoo-YGLGm1mz27PoesODVkpGFdGI&m=W7i-Cb61IIyMUQ6y1RgwXjcqIqPbe-rgUrM9f6exz7g&s=0XRFag7j5fL2KUE-eItsIahze5OKdJQ3km6smylaWVA&e=>

Postboks 1093 Blindern 0317 Oslo, Norway c.m.ess@media.uio.no <mailto:c.m.ess@media.uio.no> _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org <mailto:Air-L@listserv.aoir.org> mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__aoir.org&d=DwICAg&c=clK7... Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__listserv.aoir.org_listin...

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-- Virginia Kuhn, PhD Professor of Cinema Media Arts + Practice Division School of Cinematic Arts University of Southern California http://virginiakuhn.net/ Twitter: @vkuhn

-- Professor in Media Studies Department of Media and Communication University of Oslo <http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/charlees/index.html> Postboks 1093 Blindern 0317 Oslo, Norway c.m.ess@media.uio.no