Response to Ong’s “Orality & Literacy”

Ong begins the journey from orality to literacy by first explaining how modern thinkers first became aware of this transformation. He states that the more recent transformation from print to electronic media has shed light on the past. When comparing spoken to written language, it is important to note that writing would never existed had orality not come before. Therefore you can have orality without writing, but never writing without orality.

Currently primary oral cultures, that is, cultures never exposed to writing, barely exist. Ong reveals an interesting concern of those close to the transformation from orality to literacy. That writing is destructive of memory. Even presently, in our own era, I think we can relate to this. We write things down so we don’t forget. We do so, usually, to free our mind to process more complex analytics, or maybe to simply remember other things. But the question remains: In the process of becoming more “complex,” are we lessening the memory of our minds?

In Chapter 3 Ong discusses the psychodynamics of orality. Psychodynamics is the systematized study and theory of the psychological forces that underlie human behavior, emphasizing the interplay between unconscious and conscious motivation. Ong goes on to explain that oral speech without writing is never reproducible with one hundred percent accuracy. Today, notes to help our memory allows us to near reproducible speech, but without writing an orator must rely on oral patterns, formulas and rhythmics. For this reason, in the past, the structure and general premise of a speech will remain similar, but most certainly will change or evolve each time it is spoken. Also interesting regarding speech is the dynamics of sound. Though pretty rudimentary, I’ve never thought about sound as fleeting. We live in an age in which I hear the same song on the radio thousands of times. However when you dissect the sounds into smaller pieces, possibly sentences into words and words into syllables, a whole word never exists in the same time. Say “music.” Now say “mu-sic.” The “mu” is here and gone before the “sic” ever exists. Thus enforcing dynamics of orality.

Ong states, “writing has transformed human consciousness.” Presently, in the age of computers, we don’t often think of writing as technology, but it is. Ong uses a very simple analogy to prove this fact. He says the transition from orality to literacy is much like the transition of arithmetic to calculators. I think everyone in our generation has experienced the effect of calculators. The calculator either frees or mind to do more complex things, or “deconstructs our consciousness” — depending how you look at it. So goes technology. The debate will rage on. Is technology making us more or less productive? Does technology replace the need to use our own minds?

A final thought is this: Just as sound only exists in a moment then is forgotten, so too is technology? Think about serial cables and zip drives, even floppy disks! When new technology is created, the old technology dies. Does it leave a fingerprint? One thousand years from now, what will our culture look like to future civilizations?