Orality and literacy 25 years later

Communication Research Trends, Dec, 2007 by Paul A. Soukup

1. Introduction

Walter Ong, S.J., published Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word 25 years ago, in 1982. The book appeared in Methuen Press's New Accents series, under the general editorship of Terence Hawkes, along with titles on literature, literary criticism, and popular culture. The series holds particular interest for communication scholars, as it presented general introductions to a number of areas that greatly influenced communication studies for a new generation of students. These included Hawkes's Structuralism and Semiotics (1977), Fiske and Hartley's Reading Television (1978), Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), Bennett's Formalism and Marxism (1979), and Ong's Orality and Literacy (1982). (Ong's book proved popular and the publisher re-issued it in 1988, leading some citations of Orality and Literacy to have the 1988 date.)

In his General Editor's preface, Hawkes explains that the New Accents series responds to the growing importance of literary studies. "Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change, to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study" (in Ong, 1982, p. ix). The series set out to explore new methods of analysis as well as "new concepts of literary forms," including electronic media. Though rooted in the academic area of literary studies and "contemporary approaches to language" (p. x), Hawkes consciously chose an interest in communication for the series. Hawkes concludes with this general guideline:

   Each volume in the series will attempt an objective exposition of
   significant developments in its field up to the present as well as
   an account of its author's own views of the matter. Each will
   culminate in an informative bibliography as a guide to further
   study. And while each will be primarily concerned with matters
   relevant to its own specific interests, we can hope that a kind of
   conversation will be heard to develop between them; one whose
   accents may perhaps suggest the distinctive discourse of the
   future. (p. x)

Given the influence of the series and particularly of Orality and Literacy--"Ong's most widely known book; translated into 11 other languages" (Farrell, n.d.)--this issue of COMMUNICATION RESEARCH TRENDS looks back at Orality and Literacy: the book, its reception, and its subsequent use in communication studies. Ong's work certainly influenced more than communication, but to attempt to review all of that runs well beyond the possibility of a focused review. However, TRENDS will attempt to indicate the scope of the influence of Orality and Literacy with several bibliographies. And so, this issue also includes a (most likely incomplete) citation bibliography as well as--in the spirit of Hawkes's "informative bibliography"--an abridged classified bibliography of themes introduced in Orality and Literacy.

2. Orality and Literacy

A. The Book

Even though, as Hawkes indicated in his preface, the book serves as a stand-alone survey of developments in its field, Ong regarded the book as the third member of his trilogy on studies of the word, preceded by The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1967b) and Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (1977). Ong flagged the connection to these previous works with his subtitle, "the technologizing of the word." The first two books explored themes of oral expression in the context of the "sensorium" or combination of human senses; stages of technological involvement with the word (writing, printing, electronic); characteristics of sound and the role of silence; ways in which technological transformations interact with psychological transformation; the relationship of developments in culture and consciousness; and ideas about the relationship of primary orality to secondary orality, particularly as manifest in newer electronic media.

The ideas presented in Orality and Literacy had long germinated in Ong's thought, with some elements appearing as early as in his published dissertation on the Renaissance scholar Peter Ramus (1958), and others in his three collections, The Barbarian Within (1962), In the Human Grain (1967a), and Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (1971). Essays in these collections developed ideas about the history of rhetoric, visual representation and visualism more broadly, systems of thought, modes of conceptualization, the sense of audience, and the general interaction of culture and communication forms. Dance (1989) regards Orality and Literacy as a kind of summary of Ong's thinking, particularly in terms of how sound affects human thinking (p. 186), though the book does much more. For him it reveals Ong's concern with human culture, life, and the role of sound--or the neglect of sound (p. 196).

In all of his explorations of these topics--visualism, sound, the representation of thought, systems of consciousness, and so forth--Ong begins phenomenologically, as an historian of rhetoric and rhetorical forms. Evidence drawn from the changes in rhetoric and the contrasting understanding and expression of knowledge in Greek and Hebrew cultures grounds his explorations and eventually directs his attention to the role of communication media. His historical data pointed to the impact of the printing press. But he shortly came to understand that writing first highlighted the changes he noticed.