just call it writing

I'm just getting back to an article I saw that references "secondary orality" as a phenomenon or bi-product of Web 2.0 technologies. The basic premise is that prior to print publishing technologies (the press), human knowledge was committed orally to the individual and the community. In this post-static web content era (the whole Web 2.0 flap is beginning to wear me down), the premise holds that econdary orality is the means by which knowledge is collected, transmitted, and committed.

What bothers me about this line of reasoning (and other discussions I've seen in regard to the affects of Web 2.0 on information production and knowledge making) is that it diminishes the importance (dare I say necessity) of textual information. More so, descriptions of secondary orality only reach back to the point at which textual information is identified and aggregated with other information to create the content-rich perfect fruit of a Web 2.0 information product. Apparently the sources of this textual information are also aggregated, or pulled out of thin air.

Where are the original authors? Where are the owners of the source content? Who first committed the information to text in a cogent, concise, and meaningful way? Technical writers will tell you that they've been doing for years what Web 2.0 technologies now do with slick interfaces and power content management systems. The difference is that the tech writer always works back to the source, as it is imperative to know from whence the information came (there's that whole validation and verification thing we tech writers get hung up on).

From my reading of this, secondary-orality privileges the reusability of information over the origin of the textual artifact. Someone, somewhere had to write the thing. And all the advanced aggregators, compilers, and renderers in the world cannot replace solid, good 'ol fashioned writing fundamentals...

And we used to walk to school barefoot, uphill, both ways, through six foot snow drifts, carrying a sack of potatoes for lunch.