Traveling Orality, Digital Media and Narrative Mobilities on Facebook

Many oral genres of communication such as riddles, folktales, epics, songs, chants, legends, myths and proverbs have increasingly negotiated their existence away from their essential oral derivations to other alternative communication modes. However, these negotiations and transitions have been largely overlooked in scholarly research. With the ubiquity of digital media today, these oral forms live an autonomous, privileged existence on digital platforms on which they freely and virtually travel. New media platforms like Facebook, blogs, Twitter, You Tube, Instagram, etc. have provided veritable virtual cartographies where these oral media enact their communicative energies in a world of digimodern (digital modernity) possibilities. In this paper, therefore, my governing concern is to navigate these oral traditional modes of social media/communication and their travelling habits on the digital ecosystem. As part of the process to achieve selfperpetuation, I argue that these oral forms transcend their essentialised oral provenance to assume alternative modes of existence. One of the tactics for transcending is to migrate from their oral habitus to digital environments that guarantee them the lineaments and investments of a lived digimodern life. By travelling through digital spaces, they undergo the transformative process from the protocols of orality to digimodernity which impose on them a more assured, dynamic and enlarged existence through digital memories or archives. This strategy of self-renewal helps the oral media modes to navigate new modes of experience and to situate themselves within the fabrics of digital existence which assure them a foothold beyond the precariousness of human memory or primary orality. This in itself inaugurates a unique transition from primary to secondary and tertiary orality. The focus in this paper will be on folktales as veritable means Many oral genres of communication such as riddles, folktales, epics, songs, chants, legends, myths and proverbs have increasingly negotiated their existence away from their essential oral derivations to other alternative communication modes. However, these negotiations and transitions have been largely overlooked in scholarly research. With the ubiquity of digital media today, these oral forms live an autonomous, privileged existence on digital platforms on which they freely and virtually travel. New media platforms like Facebook, blogs, Twitter, You Tube, Instagram, etc. have provided veritable virtual cartographies where these oral media enact their communicative energies in a world of digimodern (digital modernity) possibilities. In this paper, therefore, my governing concern is to navigate these oral traditional modes of social media/communication and their travelling habits on the digital ecosystem. As part of the process to achieve selfperpetuation, I argue that these oral forms transcend their essentialised oral provenance to assume alternative modes of existence. One of the tactics for transcending is to migrate from their oral habitus to digital environments that guarantee them the lineaments and investments of a lived digimodern life. By travelling through digital spaces, they undergo the transformative process from the protocols of orality to digimodernity which impose on them a more assured, dynamic and enlarged existence through digital memories or archives. This strategy of self-renewal helps the oral media modes to navigate new modes of experience and to situate themselves within the fabrics of digital existence which assure them a foothold beyond the precariousness of human memory or primary orality. This in itself inaugurates a unique transition from primary to secondary and tertiary orality. The focus in this paper will be on folktales as veritable means

Keywords: Oralty Digital Media Facebook Virtual Travel

Author

• James Tar Tsaaior
  University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa & University of Potsdam, Germany