![]() ![]() “But there’s also this fundamental distance. “With social networks, there’s a fascination with intimacy because it simulates face-to-face communication,” Dr. The Web eliminates that need for physical proximity, enabling people to declare friendships on the basis of otherwise flimsy connections. Then there’s the question of who really counts as a “friend.” In tribal societies, people develop bonds through direct, ongoing face-to-face contact. There is presumably no tribal antecedent for popular Facebook rituals like “poking,” virtual sheep-tossing or drunk-dialing your friends. In tribal societies, forging social bonds is a matter of survival on the Internet, far less so. There are big differences between real oral cultures and the virtual kind. Strate, whose MySpace page lists his 1,335 “friends” along with his academic credentials and his predilection for “Battlestar Galactica.”Īs intriguing as these parallels may be, they only stretch so far. “It’s reminiscent of how people exchange gifts in tribal cultures,” says Dr. On Facebook, people accomplish the same thing by trading symbolic sock monkeys, disco balls and hula girls. In tribal societies, people routinely give each other jewelry, weapons and ritual objects to cement their social ties. Now he applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals of Facebook users. Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, spent two years living with a tribe in Papua New Guinea, studying how people forge social relationships in a purely oral culture. There are subtler -and perhaps more important - social dynamics at work. In other words, oral culture means more than just talking. “Oral communication,” as he put it, “unites people in groups.” The work of Father Ong, who died in 2003, seems especially prescient in light of the social-networking phenomenon. Louis University and student of Marshall McLuhan who coined the term “secondary orality” in 1982 to describe the tendency of electronic media to echo the cadences of earlier oral cultures. ![]() The Web is all of these things.”Īn early student of electronic orality was the Rev. “Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present. “If you examine the Web through the lens of orality, you can’t help but see it everywhere,” says Irwin Chen, a design instructor at Parsons who is developing a new course to explore the emergence of oral culture online. ![]() He says he is convinced that the popularity of social networks stems from their appeal to deep-seated, prehistoric patterns of human communication. “Orality is the base of all human experience,” says Lance Strate, a communications professor at Fordham University and devoted MySpace user. In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and “friending,” they see the resurgence of ancient patterns of oral communication. But is this world as new as it seems?Īcademic researchers are starting to examine that question by taking an unusual tack: exploring the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies. THE growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Second Life has thrust many of us into a new world where we make “friends” with people we barely know, scrawl messages on each other’s walls and project our identities using totem-like visual symbols.
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