Literacy News

Walter Ong is evidently one of the 20th century’s most learned men in the area of human thought and communication. He has given us many valuable insights into how our culture, worldviews and ways of thinking changed as we became literate creatures and as we allowed the written word to dominate our civilization.

All of his major points, however, could have been summed up in twenty pages or less. Instead, this book goes on and on, wallowing in endless academic jargon, citing strands of thought and research from other writers and sources (himself included), without ever laying out his points in a concise, satisfying way.

I was looking forward to some engaging examples of the oral mind-set that he claims contrasts so starkly with our literate mind-set. Instead, we only get about two pages’ worth, from one Mr. Luria’s studies in the former Soviet Union, plus a handful of passing examples from the former Yugoslavia. Though there are many passing mentions of African pre-literate societies, all Ong shares with us are a few frustratingly brief citations.

The biggest letdown wasn’t the glossing-over of ’secondary orality’, however; it was the utter lack of discussion about the internet and recent forms of writing such as email, text messaging, e-books, hypertext and the web. If this were the 1982 edition, I would understand that. But for the publisher to claim that this is a ‘revised’ edition from 2002 is simply misleading. The only discussion about the existence of electronic media occurs in two brief sections. One (pp. 78-80) is entitled “Plato, Writing and Computers”, in which Ong acknowledges that written words can be “printed from tapes composed on computer terminals.” Huh? That’s it? In the other (p. 133), entitled “Post-Typography: Electronics” he claims “…the computer….maximises commitment of the word to space and to (electronic) local motion and optimizes analytic sequentiality by making it virtually instantaneous.” Perhaps I missed something, but I get the feeling Ong doesn’t have a clue about how computers affect words, and is deliberately obfuscating.

Which is too bad, because there are some genuinely great ideas in this book and they certainly opened my eyes to a few new areas of thought. There’s a lot to reflect on in this survey, but I wish there had been more real discussion and anecdotes, rather than just a recitation of which-academic-said-what.

I would have also liked to see a greater exploration of the ways in which the transition from orality to literacy affected the development of our religious thought. That’s an area that obviously profoundly affected our civilization, has great relevance to current events, and was an area that Ong, a Jesuit priest, was an expert in.

I read this book as a requirement for a college course in media history and theory. As such, it was worthwhile, but I don’t recommend it otherwise.
Rating: 3 / 5

We type, we print. This is technology. We speak, we write, we read. This is human nature. Or is it?

Printing and computers emerged as technology. But so did writing. Writing is so natural to us that we forget it is a human creation – we can not even name what came before it (oral literature is a revealing oxymoron).

Ong convinces us that writing restructured our consciousness, and so does this little book. This technical, scholarly and at time tedious book is an eye opener. It shows that what seems like a given is possibly the most fundamental reshaping of ourselves in the history of humanity.

Those fond of Homer or Plato will wonder how they could have studied them seriously without the prism of orality vs literacy. The Iliad and Odyssey are oral poems – can we imagine what it takes to compose a tens of thousand words epic without taking a single note, without writing a single verse and without an outline? The Socrates discourses – discourses! – are the first steps of written analytic thoughts in a Society were rhetoric was king.

Beyond antic work the orality perspective is relevant for the full history of thoughts. Literature became less and less influenced by the oral constraints, shifting from the episodic epics to the modern well constructed novel. Teaching evolved from recitation and rhetoric to analytical thoughts.

Grasping orality allows a better understanding of human nature, not only by offering a glimpse of what primitive society’s thoughts might be, but by putting the evolution of thoughts in a new light. Differences in today’s societies often reflect their degree of literacy, i.e., the maturity of their written thought process. The Flynt effect – the significant increase in IQ in western societies over the last century – is a symptom of this influence. Societies only recently exposed to writing fair much lower on IQ tests. IQ tests that western experts devised to be a-cultural are in fact rooted in an advanced writing-centric culture. So much that the experts themselves are oblivious to that effect (the more a-cultural the test the stronger the Flynnt effect).

Ong wants us to glimpse into what our consciousness was before writing, to feel it if not to adopt it, and to understand how transformative that emergence must have been.
Rating: 4 / 5

Back when I was in college, one of my professors recommended this book to me. Ten years later, after skimming portions of it through several times, I read it through and discovered how important of a work it is. I would highly recommend it to anyone studying primary oral cultures and traditions.

Walter Ong approaches one of the central topics for developing a wholistic understanding of older mythic traditions– the linguistic, semiotic, and cognative differences which separate oral and literate traditions.

The book begins by discussing the works dedicated to determining the origins of Homer’s epics in the 20th century and the discovery of the extent to which the constraints of orally-transmitted knowledge structured the epics. Ong then summarizes additional research done in linguistic and anthropology fields relating to oral traditions in modern Europe, Africa, and elsewhere.

Ong succeeds in creating an accessible outline of the major transitions in human thought from orality to chirography (manuscripts), from chirography to typography (with the widespread use of the printing press), and the resurgence of some aspects of orality in modern electronic communication (both personal and mass-market).

This book is important for a number of reasons. First, it can help us to step back and be more conscious of how communications media are affecting how we communicate and, more importantly, how we think. Secondly it provides a framework for a better understanding of the older traditions in our past. Such understanding can provide a framework for better assimilating aspects of past approaches and thought processes into the present world.

Although published first in 1982, the work has been reprinted numerous times and is still in print. It is a classic in its field and I would highly recommend it.
Rating: 5 / 5