A Review of Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind by John Miles Foley

Described by the author as a morphing book, John Miles Foley’s Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind is an ambitious project that extends from the textual to the digital. Through a nonlinear reading, the book illustrates and explains to readers the various similarities and potential interactions between humankind’s oldest and newest thought technologies. Without traditional organization, the book invites readers to jump from section to section much like the way one might peruse a website — and in fact was paired with the accompanying Pathways Project website (currently offline). The nodes as Foley calls them (small chapters arranged in alphabetical order) cover a variety of topics, utilizing the authors prefix appended terminology (such as tAgora and ewords) including thought experiments that challenge our conception of what constitutes a text. The argument lies therein: a nontraditional and nonlinear book reveals the tension and dynamic relationship between oral tradition and Internet technology.