Orality and Technology, or the Bit and the Byte: The Work of the World Oral Literature Project Mark

and publishing on oral traditions, as well as his deep commitment to exploring the affordances of new digital worlds, I could think of no scholar better qualified to speak to the theme of our annual meeting: “Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities.” John’s keynote address was a great success and connected strongly with the assembled participants. He focused on the core questions that had bedeviled scholarship in our field ever since Walter J. Ong pronounced that “thinking of oral tradition or a heritage of oral performance, genres and styles as ‘oral literature ’ is rather like thinking of horses as automobiles without wheels ” (1982:12). While Ruth Finnegan, who generously offered the keynote address at our first workshop in 2009, had prepared the ground by redeeming the term “oral literature ” from the scholarly equivalent of the recycling bin,1 John took us on a conceptual journey, beyond text, beyond Ong, and in many ways beyond oral tradition itself. In his presentation, and in the important book (Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind) that was subsequently published, John illustrated how our oldest and newest technologies of communication could be thought of as fundamentally homologous. Simply put, and in John’s own compelling words, oral tradition and internet technology share the cor