Before the invention of written language that enabled the creation of book technology, the spoken word was the leading edge of communication. Spoken epic poetry such as the Iliad and Odyssey, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh was the content of the speech medium. These epics were created as spoken pieces, and because listeners lacked an alphabet to commodify them (separate them from their performance), the tales had to be heard and experienced first-hand.
This group experience of the spoken epic involves
what authors Hobart and Schiffman term
commemoration: “In the world before writing, memory is the social act of
remembering” (15). The way pre-literate media (speech) shaped culture
includes this commemorative act. Pre-literate cultures had no other
way of storing information and memory than to relive it. They could not
write something down, forget about it, and then relearn the same information
at a later date by reading it, because they lacked the technology of the
written alphabet necessary to do so. Of course, they had the recollecting
powers of the mind alone, but as today's stories, passed from one person
to the next inevitably change, so did oral communications as human recollection
failed in terms of an exact repetition of the original performance.
Hence, each time listeners heard a spoken account of the Iliad,
it changed a bit. In terms of an exceptional pre-literate performer of
the Iliad or Odyssey, Robert Fitzgerald goes as far as to
say that "He inherited a traditional art comparable in range and refinement
to the art of the musical virtuoso in our day, but more creative and fluid,
for in some degree it remained an art of improvisation" (484). Mnemonic
devices such as rhyme and meter aided memory and kept the story on track
(Hobart & Schiffman, 24), and as McLuhan would agree, can be counted
as technological advances prior to the invention of alphabet because they
extend language technology.
An analog to the spoken epic experience is the modern-day concert experience.
Both are examples of live performance. For an example, the
Rolling Stones' song "Sympathy for the Devil" is more like a spoken epic
than a written account of an epic. This is because song and spoken
epic utilize the same medium. A written version of Mick Jagger's
lyrics would recount the Devil's first person account of his life and times.
But in a live atmosphere, the song doesn't serve to give us specific facts
or storable information about Satan. It serves group memory in that it
reminds audiences of rock 'n' roll hedonism and danger, and as the Stones'
signature song, it partly commemorates the idea of the band itself.
The medium used to present the song (live or recorded or written out) affects
how the song will be perceived. A more succinct illustration: if you have
been to a concert, is it natural for you stand back and reflect critically
on the music being played, or do you engage yourself in it, perhaps by
singing along, tapping your foot, or by some other method of participation?
Without a stored record of the performance, the memory of it fades quickly. Imagine if there were no recording technology at all. The only ways to remember songs would be to go to concerts to hear them or to sing them (as many epic poems were sung)- to relive the memory in order to remember it.