Orality and literacy 25 years later

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

Next comes a contrast with literacy. Writing, widely acquired only slowly over centuries, changes cultures through changing patterns of expression, or, in Ong's title of Chapter 4 "Writing restructures consciousness." The restructuring Ong has in mind comes to individuals through their cultures and comes in different ways: for example, where writing replaces a dependence on memory to preserve culturally important things, people both remember more and have time to think about other things (pp. 96-101). But before Ong tells that story, he describes writing and doubts about it ("context less," p. 78; absent an author, p. 79; external to an individual, p. 79; passive, p. 79; destroying the social order, p. 80). Writing is artificial, a technology (p. 81) with a particular history of scripts developed in a number of cultures, but only one alphabet (pp. 85-96). Cultures had to adapt to this new technology of writing, which they did, but over centuries, inventing uses for it and adapting existing customs to it, as for example its status as legal evidence (pp. 96101). With this general introduction setting the stage, Ong suggests "some dynamics of textuality" (p. 101), not quite in parallel to his treatment of orality, but calling attention to what writing does to cultures and people. For example, writing removes people from direct or live interaction with one another, justifying solitude (pp. 101-102); writing allows or even encourages a distance between person and text (p. 103); writing supports an economy of style and the ability to polish text, removing inconsistencies (p. 104); writing establishes a "correct" form of a language (p. 107). Ong returns to the history of rhetoric to show how modes of expression, persuasion, and proof change with writing (pp. 109-112): the evidence remains frozen in texts preserved across the centuries. In all this, though, orality and traces of oral expression do not disappear--oral expression remains natural to humans where writing is always something learned.

As he did with the paired chapters on orality, Ong does here as well, but in the instance of Chapter 5 "give[s] some brief attention to print, for print both reinforces and transforms the effects of writing on thought and expression" (p. 117). Drawing on the work of scholars as varied as Clanchy (1979) and Eisenstein (1979), Ong examines what happens with print. Because of its automated nature and its identical pages, print promotes indexing texts (p. 123); it more definitively creates a sense of an object that contains information (p. 126); and it allows the creation of meaningful space--not only words but page layout can convey meaning (p. 127). Over time other consequences of print emerge: dictionaries (p. 130-131); private ownership of words and ideas, leading eventually to copyright (p. 131); and a sense of closure on the one hand and intertextuality on the other (pp. 132-133). Ong takes the opportunity of this chapter to briefly note electronic media as the next stage in the evolution of communication technologies and to introduce in this context what he had first noted in his 1971 Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: the idea of secondary orality, that is, the re-emergence of orality in these new acoustic media, bringing with it again the distinctive characteristics of oral cultures (p. 135-138).