Ong and Modern Technology

In the final pages of Ong's The Writer's Audience Is Always Fiction, he discussed the genres of the personal letter and the personal diary. He determines that in both cases, and especially so in that of the diary, the writer and the reader are fictionalized by the putting on of masks.

While the letter and the diary are still genres widely employed today, the introduction of various technologies has expanded our genres of communication. A modern version of the letter might be the text message and, similarly, a modern form of the diary would be a blog. How would Ong view these in terms of fictionalizing the writer and reader?

Ong writes: "First, you have no way of adjusting to the friend's real mood as you would be able to adjust in oral conversation" (19). Removed from context, this sounds very similar to the complaints imposed by the attackers of the text message, but Ong is in fact referring to the personal letter. These two genres of text have some differences which make their similarities more interesting. For example, a letter must traverse both time and space, but a text message can be sent virtually in an instant across a great distance. And while letters are conventionally formal with a certain length to them, text messages are notorious for their informality, both in tone and in grammar, as well as their brevity.

These genres are similar, especially in the masks put on to fictionalize the participants. In both cases you do not really know where the reader is, what they are doing, how they are feeling and you construct your text outside of any indicators as to your own such true situation. You may write a letter regarding the presidential campaign on which you and your correspondent are both working. Your letter will not reflect that you are currently in your pajamas drinking tea on the porch and neither will you know your reader has just won the lottery and will be quitting soon. Likewise, you can compose a text message to a peer asking about the homework for a shared class, but omitting that your cat just died and you are completely distraught while your peer may receive this text message while engaging in intimate activities and you will never be able to frame your text with this in mind. And likewise, their response will unlikely reflect their activities.

There is an important distinction between the two genres, though. While a letter is a complete text, a text message can often be seen as an utterance, a piece of the larger text of the text message conversation. Often we learn more through a collection of text messages, such as though commonly found in "epic fail" memes circulating the internet, than we do from a single text message, such as those found on the website . This is due to the near instantaneous nature of the text message. You can respond quicker and so you can carry out a sort of conversation, and as such a single text message is incomplete. Because of the rapidity of texting, you can change your tone based on how they respond, either through word choice, punctuation, or the use of emoticons. In this way, a text message conversation is closer to an oral conversation than a letter is and because of this, if you are willing to remove a mask or two, you can achieve a truer communication.

In terms of the blog -- I find it quite interesting because, like the text message, the similarities it has to a diary allow us to connect Ong's article, but the differences between the genres make it interesting. Yes, a blog can be used as a diary, but it is a diary you share with (potentially) the whole internet world and this changes the audience. Perhaps the audience is more fictionalized in a blog, as it is more abstract, though Ong seems to think the diary is extremely fictionalizing because you must fictionalize yourself. In either case, there is the hurtle of discovering who to address. "And to what self is he talking? To the self he imagines he is? Or would like to be? Or thinks other people think he is? TO himself as he is now? Or as he will probably or ideally be twenty years hence? If he addresses not himself but 'Dear Diary,' who in the world is 'Dear Diary'? What role does this imply?" (Ong, 20) In many blogs, the writer attempts to address their readership as a whole, but as Ong said (11) a readership is an abstraction, not a collectivity like the term audience, and as such can not represent the plurality of readers. Blogs never seem to completely address the exact readers with whom they are communicating, even though they can try. This trying is a fictionalization.

If you have time, watch this video --
It is a recording of a lecture at a convention which discusses YouTube and the vlog. The speaker points out very clearly the issue of putting on a mask for this genre of communication and I think it helps a lot with understanding the fictionalization of the writer and the audience. It discusses the vlog version of addressing "Dear Diary" as well!