Language and Media Dictionary of Key Terms (April 2016) Martin Montgomery

oppositional reading media n. => encoding/decoding. mmo

oral culture media n. a culture that depends primarily on word of mouth for the transmission of knowledge, values and beliefs. Oral cultures are typically described by contrast to literate cultures in which knowledge and beliefs are codified and transmitted by means of writing and written text. Putative differences between oral and literate cultures have been of keen interest to anthropologists, sociologists and literary-cultural theorists since at least the mid-twentieth century. Oral cultures are thought to be more empathetic and participatory, to depend more on associative and analogical lines of reasoning than the more linear and syllogistic modes encouraged by literacy and to favour implied rather than explicit meanings. In practice, many cultures seem to exist on a continuum between the two types. Indeed, one of the most influential accounts of orality and literacy by the American Jesuit literary and cultural historian, Walter J. Ong (1912-2003), suggests that the influence of digital communication on contemporary literate cultures may be re-emphasising the oral in a phase that Ong calls ‘secondary orality’. => orality. mmo

orality media n. a quality of those cultures or groups that have been largely untouched by the knowledge and use of writing and print. Under conditions of orality knowledge and traditions are passed on by word of mouth rather than codified in text. => oral culture.****

other media n perhaps the most important but problematic term in the contemporary social and human sciences, the other has been a significant focus of discussion in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary studies. In sociology, for instance, the American sociologist, George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), proposed that for the socially constituted ‘self’ to emerge within socialization some notion of a ‘generalized other’ is required: in other words, for the child to act as a social agent or being it has to come to an appreciation of the nature of the other roles that make up any social activity in which it is engaged. In this sociological tradition, therefore, ‘the other’ exists as a necessary and complementary counterpart to ‘the self’. In a radically different idiom the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) proposed that the subject only comes to full self-consciousness and discovers a sense of its own identity when it recognizes the fundamental difference from the self of ‘the Other’. In Lacan, therefore, as for Mead, recognition of the other is a necessary and inevitable part of the individual’s development. In anthropology and literary studies, however, the other emerges as an epiphenomenon of the contact between groups and peoples. Anthropology’s emphasis on the customs and mentalities of pre-historical societies led to an assumption of difference in which the object of study was constructed as distant, strange and exotic. This process itself, however, becomes the focus of attention in literary (especially post-colonial) studies where a prevailing tendency to construct the other as inferior is subjected to extensive critique. Subordinate groups (whether they be identified in terms of race, sex, class, religious affiliation, or some other attribute) have tended to be represented as other – often drawing upon the same terms (e.g., irrational, lazy, sensual, impulsive, exotic, violent, submissive, enigmatic) - from the perspective of a dominant group (members of which are assumed to share positive qualities such as rationality, industriousness, self-control, normality, and so). Whether the dominant group is the colonizer, the ruling class, male or white, the processes seem to be similar, so that a general term for them, ‘othering’, has been coined. In short, powerful groups come to a positive definition of themselves by projecting negative qualities onto others. mmo