One finds oneself in an odd position as a reviewer of this book. The genre of book review depends on some premises that the volume under review would have us see as inherently limiting, being bred of a technological regime, writing, that by its nature depends on restrictive systems of authority and hierarchy. It is a core premise of this “study”—one is not quite sure what name to give it—that “linear” textuality, as embodied in the “brick and mortar” book, stands in opposition to two other technologies, orality and internet-ality. These are, by their natures, non-linear, of distributed authority, and at least less rigidly hierarchical than texts, in the narrow sense of that word. This written book review is automatically a participant in the system its object compares unfavorably to the other two modes of communication.
Circularities emerge immediately, however, when this review takes its allotted place in an online archive. Presumably it thereby enters the network of pathways that characterize the “eAgora,” Foley’s term for one of the three “marketplaces” of communication that constitute the underlying armature of this study. The others are the oAgora, the space of orality where folklore and face-to-face experience reside, and the tAgora, that restrictive domain epitomized by the book. Oral Tradition and the Internet rambles widely across many topics of deep interest to folklorists. Its frequently repeated core argument is that the oAgora and the eAgora are at every turn analogically related to one another and fundamentally different from the tAgora. In other words, the dynamics of oral culture are recapitulated (by other means) in the operations of the Internet, and both of these contrast sharply with the culture of the written text. The most glaring circularity, of course, is that this book amounts to a sustained argument about the ultimate inability of books to capture what happens in the eAgora and the oAgora, both of which it repeatedly attempts to illustrate using the very technology that is almost defined by its inability to capture them.
This vortex of circularity starts to yawn before us as soon as we open the physical cover of Oral Tradition and the Internet and learn that what we hold is a brick and mortar avatar of a stall in the eAgora, that is, an online wiki, the Pathways Project website (www.pathwaysproject.org). The book, like the website, is arranged not in chapters, but as an alphabetical series of “nodes.” We are invited to engage the written text not as a static, linear, beginning-to-end experience, as the deeply entrenched ideology of writing expects of us, but as a “morphing book” that, like the wiki, we may navigate in any direction, starting anywhere, jumping to anywhere else, and simply stopping whenever we wish, since there is no specified end point.
One cannot help but feel there is something a bit retro about all this. The flush of excitement over the experience of hypertextuality that informs this volume (and its eAgora counterpart) belongs to an earlier structure of feeling in the ever-accelerating onslaught of digital innovation. The metaphor of the agora keeps our feet on the ground and circulating in two dimensions, while “the cloud,” and whatever comes next no doubt, starts to weaken the remnants of gravity altogether.
Perhaps it is paradoxical to say that I find the slightly past-due quality of this book to be what makes it useful from a theoretical perspective. It gives us the critical distance to contemplate its central argument less in terms of its acceptability than in terms of its premises. The most useful question might not be whether we think Foley is right that there is a homologous connection between oral culture and digital culture that stands in superior contrast to the culture of writing. Instead, we might ask what the framing of his argument tells us, as folklorists, about the terms in which we are thinking about such issues these days. For one thing, we see quite blatantly revealed how little influenced folklore studies have been by those old “high theory” ideas about the philosophical bankruptcy of the speech versus writing binary. The thorough unpacking of logocentric fallacies does not get even a nod here.
But that too is an old story. More to the point for folklorists today is Foley’s construction of how the oral, face-to-face practices and performances we have always studied relate to the intangibly mediated practices of the digital world, the Internet above all. By positing this as a fundamentally analogical relationship—they very much look like one another in their dynamics and effects—we are set up to consider not just how this is true, and certainly in many ways it is, but also to reflect on how else we might think about this issue, including whether it is the most salient one for us. For example, might these matters be more revealingly framed in terms of temporalities than in terms of technologies? Can’t the textuality of writing be conceived of as no less a dynamic flow than oral and digital media, just running in a lower gear?
And what if we posit a relation between the oral and the digital that is not analogic but more direct. I am thinking, for example, of what happens when the paper archive of folkloric material becomes digitized and thereby available to algorithmic processing that “performs” new traditions by revealing previously unrecognized connections across time and space. And of course there are already no end of eAgora “ethnicities” that cannot be understood as just analogues to “brick-and-mortar” ethnicities.
In the end, Oral Tradition and the Internet performs at least two very valuable services. One is that it reminds us of the great career of a premier folklorist. The many concrete examples he deploys reflect the remarkable diversity and depth of John Miles Foley’s research. The second is that is it gives us a fairly simple reference point against which to push off and establish a reflexively productive distance.
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[Review length: 987 words • Review posted on February 19, 2014]