The acoustic age is the age about which Walter J. Ong wrote in, among other places, Orality and Literacy (1982). It's the age that predated the visual age in the sense that there was no semiotic consciousness, no sense that signs could stand in the place of speech events, that symbols could join together in sustained meaning. Human relationships, therefore, were necessarily synchronous, relying on the use of a great deal of memory since the idea of placing memory in a container outside the self (canning memory, if you will) had not been conceived. People delivering messages for other people was about as close to asynchronous communication as could be had. Folks, consequently, largely interacted with one another in the moment -- the idea of interacting outside of the moment would take a transformation of consciousness eventually brought about by development and spread of literacy.

When this form of social relationship began to shift at the dawn of an awakening Western semiotic consciousness, the transition was lamented by the character of Socrates in Plato's "Phaedrus" when the questioning sage, around 2,376 years ago, dragged the work's eponym away from his intended reading, an action that eventually led to his explaining that synchronous dialogic encounters are more meaningful than the reliance on speechless and non-interactive texts.

Texts, he explains, cannot be questioned or argued with, and "when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves." Texts, as a result, run into the danger of being misinterpreted and misrepresented by readers who have no access to the authors -- especially in circumstances where the edge of memory, as Thamus argues to Teuth, has been dulled by this over-reliance on setting it aside.

For this reason, written texts are really only valuable to their authors when "their compositions are based on knowledge of the truth, and they can defend or prove them, when they are put to the test, by spoken arguments, which leave their writings poor in comparison of them, then they are to be called, not only poets, orators, legislators, but are worthy of a higher name [philosophers], befitting the serious pursuit of their life" (emphasis mine).

 

Plato -- The conversation about the impact of developing technologies on social relationships has been going on for some time -- at least 2,376 years.

In this pre-literate, acoustic age, then, in the decades before the advent of Herodotus (whose writings three quarters of a century before Plato's earned him the twin nicknames of 'the father of history' and 'the father of lies'), the West was a land with a past but with no history, with no written account of itself that it could pass to its posterity.  This acoustic age was not, therefore, one in which people merely preferred hearing to seeing -- it was one in which synchronicity was the norm and asynchronicity was not available or, when it finally was, found itself highly problematized. (Back)