Orality, Literacy and New Orality: Forms of Remembering and Technologies of Communication

My paper today can be considered among those offering a theoretical discussion that aims to enable analytical framework for empirical studies. The latter will be worked out through other papers presented at this conference, as well as at the conference scheduled for the year 2005 in Cardiff. In particular, Marianne Boerch and Henrick Lassen, whom I deeply thank for the organisation of this important first conference of our sub-project dedicated to ‘Oral and written history’, invited me to speculate on the interplay that, in time, characterised the complex relationship between orality and literacy in relation to the ideas of memory/remembrance, as well as to the new technologies of communication. I will try to fulfil their request, introducing, towards the end some open questions concerning what communication theorists now call ‘secondary orality’; and I intend to pursue these questions in the forthcoming months, in view of our second conference in Wales.