Page 184 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

ORIENTALISM

under scrutiny due to accusations that they are impeding fair
competition in the online market by restricting the supply and licence
of major label music to other online distributors (Healy, 2001; Myers,
2002). It seems the liberating promise of online music distribution has
been replaced by the same dichotomy that plagues the offline music
business. Major recording labels not only have the major artists
contracted to them but ensure the right to distribution of this content
lies solely within their power.

See also: Copyright, Intellectual property, MP3

ORALITY

That which characterises speech; a culture characterised by the
primacy of speech over other forms of signification. Usually opposed
to literacy, orality refers to those aspects of a culture’s way of life that
are attributable to its investment in the resources of spoken language.
These may include formal ways of organising thought (myth) or
knowledge (magic); or they may be associated with rhetorical and
other systems for fixing and transmitting sense.
The idea that oral cultures are fundamentally different from literate
ones at the level of social and individual consciousness is associated
with Marshall McLuhan, and may be followed up in Ong (1982). The
analysis of oral systems of thought has occupied social anthropologists
for years, and is perhaps best approached via the work of Le ´vi-Strauss
(see Leach 1976; Sturrock 1979), whose structural method revolution-
ised Western thinking about ‘primitive’ myths, analysing them as a
form of reasoning appropriate to oral societies.
Despite its official promotion and pervasive presence in industrial
societies, literacy nevertheless has to co-exist with an abiding orality in
certain crucial guttural spheres – perhaps the most obvious of which is
the early socialisation of infants (see Lotman, 1990).
See also: Literacy

ORIENTALISM

A term used to describe a way of imaging what was traditionally
known as the East. Developed by Edward Said (1979), a Palestinian
intellectual living in the US, Orientalism refers to those practices,
writings, policies, philosophies and ideologies that sought to construct

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