Oral tradition, like all communication modes, has its own established traditions, strengths and limitations. Since there is no written form, orature is maintained and passed-on through retelling. Because of this, the message takes on a dynamic quality, evolving with each telling. By definition, oral tradition is interactive, lending a flexibility not accessible through traditional typographic means.

Orature reached one of its highest points in Medieval Europe with the troubadour. Because it must be remembered, and it was not uncommon for tales to stretch into several sessions, the troubadours tended to rely on remembering key phrases as mnemonic devices to recall the entire tale:

In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence. Your thoughts must come into being in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antitheses, in alliterations and assonances, in epithetic and other formulary expressions, in standard thematic settings (the assembly, the meal, the duel, the heros helper, and so on), in proverbs which are constantly heard by everyone so that they come to mind readily and which themselves are patterned for retention and ready recall or in other mnemonic form. (Lord, p.58) *

Throughout oral tradition, there are an abundance or formulas, short phrases that bring a character or event added significance such as the glorious revolution, or resourceful Odysseus. Lord considers these to be fundamental to oral poetry:

the formulas of oral traditional poetry have an important and necessary function in the composition and transmission of that poetry, a function which has no parallel in the slogans and clichés of popular usage. (Lord, p. 57)

Also, important facts were repeated throughout the story so the audience could more readily remember them. It was not uncommon for the Troubadour to customize his tale to fit the local flavour (perhaps one that included the local Lord). Nor was it uncommon for the audience to correct the teller if a critical part was missing, much as a child corrects the parent if they try to make the bedtime story shorter.

* Here Lord is quoting Father Ongs Orality and Literacy.

With the increase in literacy brought about by the printing press, communication took a more permanent, and therefore static form, The creator of the story became further removed from the listener. No longer did the story change to satisfy the whimsy of the local audience, but took on a progressively more static form. A form which has remained essentially unchanged until recent advent of multimedia which is "characterized by a fluctuation and change that cancels the self-contained invariability of printed texts. (Vos, P.222)"

Computers have opened an new dimension, previously unavailable to Typographers, time. Designers can now work with a dynamic medium as opposed to the static available only a generation ago:

Today, we can make type talk: in any language, at any volume, with musical underscoring or sci-fi effects or overlapping violins. We can sequence and dissolve, pan and tile, fade to black and specify type in sensurround. (Helfand, p 14).

This new dimension allows type to literally come alive. Type can now zig and zag, blur, grow, dance and zoom across the screen. More importantly, type can now speak: "the relationship between design and sound and in particular, between the spoken word and the written word. . . enable us to design with sound. (Helfand, p.14)" Type is moving into a period where it is not merely designed, but composed, much like the troubadours composed their poems.

Because words can now be heard as well as seen, the richness conveyed by the change in inflection, volume and pacing that the Troubadours brought to their oral tales can now adapted to the multimedia screen:

In animation, there are soundtracks that give you emotional and expressive backgrounds. But it really takes a creative designer who knows both sound and type to begin to design some new form of poster where the sound is as integral as the visualization, said Cooper. . . . What happens when this typographical sound tool is used in relation to a complex piece of information involving text and video remains to be determined. (Abrams, p.53)

Hypertext allows the flexibility of customizing the experience to suit the individual. And multimedia brings with it not one, but two additional dimensions: time and depth. Time allows the designer to give words, phrases and images power and importance by making them the only objects on the screen, or having them span several more transient events. And depth allows the designer to navigate around and through items on the screen, the screen turns into a cockpit windshield, admitting onto a landscape of data one navigates with the press of a button. (Abrams, p.54)

New media poets have been experiment with hypertext for decades and are a potential source for designers to learn from. The new media poet "takes language beyond the confines of the printed page and explores a new syntax made of linear and non-linear animation, hyperlinks, interactivity, real-time text generation, ... visual tempo. (Kak, Intro)" Kac's medium of choice is hologram. This allows the poem to change depending on the viewer's position:

It treats the word as an immaterial form, that is, as a sign that can change or dissolve into thin air, breaking its formal stiffness. Freed of the page and freed from other palpable materials, the word invades the reader's space and forces him or her to read it in a dynamic way. (Kac p308)

It is his experiments with dynamism that designers can learn from to create a more rewarding and interesting experience for the viewer. Kac sees type not as words, but as forms to experience:

Perception in space of colors, volumes, degrees of transparency, changes in form, relative positions of letters and words, and the appearance and disappearance of forms is inseparable from the syntactic and semantic perception of the text. Color is not simply color; it has a poetic function as well, A letter is not just a letter but also a pictorial shape. (Kac and Botelho, p.397)

Learning from other media is the key for designers to quickly and effectively use this new medium. Many designers get caught up in the flash and new tricks that are afforded by multimedia: audio, animation, color, morphing. While all these are useful and can ultimately enhance the effect of the message. Designers should be careful to learn form the mistakes of early desktop publishers who made use of every font face available to them and wound up with a muddied, ineffectual newsletter. Also, designers need to avoid information overload, the transmission of so much information that the audience cannot consume it all and winds up absorbing little at all. (I have found that my web design students suffer from these very diseases. Only when I have them think of the computer screen as a poster or book cover do they remember the lessons of the past several years.)

Designers can also learn from how the audience is already using electronic communication. The connection between electronic communication and orature is already apparent in daily communication. Email and chat are two instant, or nearly so, mediums for communication across vast distances. While both are crude by design standards, both seem to have taken on the more casual tone of a conversation rather than a formal communication, [email] bears a closer stylistic resemblance to conversational speech than to written language. (Helfand, p.16) It is this oral flavour that I feel designers can capitalize on most. Multimedia finally allows designers to design in four dimensions and stimulate not only the visual, but the aural as well (and, to a very limited extent tactile).

There are numerous problems of which the designer must constantly be aware. The most obvious of these are that the audience does not sense aural in the same manner as visual, Since the listener cant see the printed words, many textual subtleties just dont come across. Obviously the ear cant pick up unusual spellings and punctuation or interesting layouts, and it can have trouble with coined words, puns double meanings, and other word play. (Kendall). Unlike traditional design, the designer of multimedia usually is not certain of the exact setup of the audiences computer, and therefore has to design a lot of flexibility into the piece. the user can and does mute at will, the visual impact of written typography is not to be discounted. (Helfand, p. 19) Also, there may be vast disparities in the way an image is drawn on the machine; the differences can be caused by operating system, memory, platform choice, monitor adjustment, etc. Unlike designing a poster, the multimedia designer cannot place type exactly 65 points from the top edge, but rather must design everything in terms of relative position to other elements on the screen, and must check the design on multiple platforms in order to minimize the negative impact of the variety of devices with which the piece will be experienced.

Just as orators have to worry about language and inflection, and typographers must consider ink, paper and press differences, so too do multimedia designers have problems with platform differences. However, by combining the strengths of Orality and typography, the multimedia designer can shape the new medium and create a communication device as revolutionary as the printing press, film and TV. It is also to these media that the designer should look for clues and ideas on how to effectively mold this now communication form from a visual wasteland into a powerful new medium.

Bibliography

Abrams, Janet. Murial Coopers Visible Wisdom I.D. 41.5 (September October 1994): 48-55,96-7.

Kac, Eduardo. Introduction Visible Language 30.2 (1997): introduction.

Kac, Eduardo, and Ormeo Botelho. Holopoetry and Fractal Holopoetry: Digital Holography Leonardo (1989): 397-402.

Kendall, Robert The Electronic Word: Techniques and Possibilities for Interactive Multimedia Literature The Thirteenth Annual Symposium on Small Computers in the Arts: Program and Proceedings (1993) Unpublished. <http://www.wenet.net/~rkendall/elecword.htm> (4, June 1997).

Lord, Albert B. Characteristics of Orality Oral Tradition. 2.1 (1987): 54-72.

Voss, Eric. New Media Poetry: Theory and Strategies Visible Language 30.2 (1997): 216-233.