Orality and Literacy
By Walter J. Ong
The most interesting ideas in this book deal with how writing as a technology influences the way we think. I was fascinated by the exploration of oral cultures and how they have to think and structure their communication differently in the absence of writing.
View on AmazonWriting helps people reproduce lines of thought
Writing enables a thinker to produce the same line of thought over and over again. Moreover, it allows the others to reproduce the thinker's line of thought.
In the total absence of any writing, there is nothing outside the thinker, no text, to enable him or her to produce the same line of thought again or even to verify whether he or she has done so or not.
By storing knowledge outside the mind, writing and, even more, print downgrade the figures of the wise old man and the wise old woman, repeaters of the past, in favor of younger discoverers of something new.
There is no way directly to refute a text. After absolutely total and devastating refutation, it says exactly the same thing as before.
Writing and memory shape our thought
In oral cultures you have to translate your thoughts into something that can be remembered, because in the absence of writing memory is all you have. When you write, you translate your thoughts into words on a page. The medium you choose determines the type of thinking that can be done.
Technology can enrich the human psyche
When we meld with technology we are capable of doing expressing ourselves in a a way that would not be possible without the technology:
The fact is that by using a mechanical contrivance, a violinist or an organist can express something poignantly human that cannot be expressed without the mechanical contrivance.
To achieve such expression of course the violinist or organist has to have interiorized the technology, made the tool or machine a second nature, a psychological part of himself or herself. This calls for years of ‘practice’, learning how to make the tool do what it can do. Such shaping of a tool to oneself, learning a technological skill, is hardly dehumanizing. The use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its interior life. Writing is an even more deeply interiorized technology than instrumental musical performance is. But to understand what it is, which means to understand it in relation to its past, to orality, the fact that it is a technology must be honestly faced.
The role of redundancy in oral cultures
Thought requires a through line of continuity. Writing establishes that line outside of the mind. If a reader gets distracted or loses their context, they can retrieve it by glancing back over the text. In oral discourse the listener can't do this. Speakers need to be redundant to keep themselves and their listeners on track. One of the reasons writing is difficult is that the author has to work to strip out the natural tendency to be redundant.
The conservative nature of oral history
In cultures where knowledge that is not repeated aloud vanishes, they invest energy into repeating over and over again the things that have been arduously learned over the ages. The need to do that establishes a conservative mindset that inhibits intellectual experimentation.
Knowledge is hard to come by and oral societies value wise elders who specialize in conserving it. Writing, by contrast, favors the explorers.
Introducing new elements to old stories
This is the way that oral cultures are still original. Every time they tell a story they have to introduce it in a unique situation, and they need to introduce it uniquely because everything hinges on the audience's response. They can do this by introducing new elements into old stories. How do you make old stories interact with new and complicated situations?
The power of names
Names convey power over things. Without learning a bunch of names it is impossible to understand a complex subject such as chemistry. In that sense words are a gatekeeper to understanding.
Reference
Ong, W. J. (2013). Orality and Literacy: 30th Anniversary Edition. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.