CS 640K Fall 2025 Sound, Aurality, and Power

  In Pontypool, Mazzy’s radio show is obviously an oral tradition. Lis teners tune in daily for news and entertainment . His speech is spontaneous, performative, and intimate. His radio show creates a community of listeners that share common interests and knowledge. Through orality, Mazzy creates a form of communication that bridges the speaker to the audience. Radio allows for an extension of social practices like dialogue, storytelling , and shared experiences. In a mediated environment, the voice can recapture the authority and meaning it had in oral societies.   Through the medium of radio, Mazzy’s radio show is space-biased . These media forms transmit information instantaneously over vast distances , and the control of information is centralized . Unlike time-biased media that preserve traditions, space- biased media emphasizes reach, immediacy, and influence . I interprete d the virus in Pontypool as an allegory to the virus of misinformation. It illuminat...

In the excerpt from The Bias of Communication, Innis notes that “An oral tradition implies freshness and elasticity but students of anthropology have pointed to the binding character of custom in [ oral] cultures ” (4). Furthermore, Innis explicates the process by which writing tends to form “monopolies of knowledge” given that literacy is typically closely tied to social class . T his contrasts with oral societies, in which knowledge is embodied and stays close to lived experiences of those in the community .     I think that Grant Mazzy’s radio performance in Pontypool exemplifies both these points. Mazzy can be thought of as a sort of ‘knowledge keeper’ of the small town, since it is his job not to hoard relevant knowledge but rather to share it with the community as soon as he acquires it. Throughout the movie, we hear Mazzy sharing ‘breaking news ’ updates , his live on-air conversation with Ken over the telephone. Thus, the job of a radio show host of a small town ...

  My first instinct when considering the virus vector in Pontypool is that it’s an example of time bias. The way the virus connects to oral culture, and the way understanding of the word seems to dictate who gets infected would indicate that the infection is fleeting, and relies on memory, context, and understanding to spread.  However, after considering further, I think that is more indicative of the virus itself rather than the vector (the thing that carries the virus). The vector, and perhaps the thing that makes the virus so prolific, is the radio. The virus’ ability to spread across space rather than just time is an underlying force throughout the entire story. To start, Mazzy’s spread of the term “Honey” through the missing cat announcement was likely one way the virus spread. While Mazzy and the radio team understood the word as a name and not a term of endearment, listeners may not have received that context and heard the word in the way the French broadcast warned aga...