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Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures offering a very clear account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology. In the course of his study, Walter J. Ong offers fascinating insights into oral genres across the globe and through time, and examines the rise of abstract philosophical and scientific thinking. He considers the impact of orality-literacy studies not only on literary criticism and theory but on our very understanding of what it is to be a human being, conscious of self and other. This is a book no reader, writer or speaker should be without.
216 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
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December 28, 2012
"Literacy transforms consciousness, producing patterns of thought which to literates seem perfectly commonplace and 'natural' but which are possible only when the mind has devised and internalized the technology of writing."
That looks like a fairly succinct summary of these densely packed pages. Well done, whoever wrote the flyleaf introduction.
This is what academic writing should do: instruct, amaze, amuse, engage and shift the way you look at the world. 'Primitive' cultures do not 'lack' the skill of writing, but organize information and communication in a quite different way. It's a function of our graphocentrism that we see oral cultures as incomplete, lacking. Writing is the impoverished medium: no interaction between speaker and respondent, no tone of voice, an absence of the human. The written word is a thing.
Ong's main theory is that it is the 'thingness' of the written word which has changed our patterns of thought, made distance and analysis and linearity possible. In an oral culture, language is a mode of action. Knowledge is conceived of close to human terms and situations. Impersonal, neutral lists are unassimilable: places, people, are seen as doing things, in a context of human relations and activities. Close to human life. One of the most illuminating examples of this different thinking is shown in fieldwork done by Luria in remote areas of Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in 1931-2. Subjects were given drawings of four objects, and were asked to group together those that were similar, or could be placed in one group. One series consisted of hammer, saw, log, hatchet. Those subjects who had not been to school thought entirely in terms of practical situations: if you are a workman you think of applying the hammer, saw or whatever to the log, not keeping them away from it (daft idea). One decided that the hatchet had to go - it doesn't do as good a job as the others. When it is pointed out to him that three are tools and the log isn't, he replies:"Yes, but even if we have tools, we still need wood."
Perfectly logical.
That looks like a fairly succinct summary of these densely packed pages. Well done, whoever wrote the flyleaf introduction.
This is what academic writing should do: instruct, amaze, amuse, engage and shift the way you look at the world. 'Primitive' cultures do not 'lack' the skill of writing, but organize information and communication in a quite different way. It's a function of our graphocentrism that we see oral cultures as incomplete, lacking. Writing is the impoverished medium: no interaction between speaker and respondent, no tone of voice, an absence of the human. The written word is a thing.
Ong's main theory is that it is the 'thingness' of the written word which has changed our patterns of thought, made distance and analysis and linearity possible. In an oral culture, language is a mode of action. Knowledge is conceived of close to human terms and situations. Impersonal, neutral lists are unassimilable: places, people, are seen as doing things, in a context of human relations and activities. Close to human life. One of the most illuminating examples of this different thinking is shown in fieldwork done by Luria in remote areas of Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in 1931-2. Subjects were given drawings of four objects, and were asked to group together those that were similar, or could be placed in one group. One series consisted of hammer, saw, log, hatchet. Those subjects who had not been to school thought entirely in terms of practical situations: if you are a workman you think of applying the hammer, saw or whatever to the log, not keeping them away from it (daft idea). One decided that the hatchet had to go - it doesn't do as good a job as the others. When it is pointed out to him that three are tools and the log isn't, he replies:"Yes, but even if we have tools, we still need wood."
Perfectly logical.
October 25, 2015
The book is from 1982, and so Ong's critique of written texts is based on its Modernist characteristics - the way it represents a closed singular voice: authoritative, and not just unresponsive to the reader, but unaware of a reader other than in the most abstract and removed sense. With the rise of the internet these characteristics give way to limitless intertextuality. The written text is opened up to a multiplicity of voices that can respond immediately to a written text, that remix, reconstitute, and subvert.
It's interesting that Ong criticizes written debate as lacking spontaneity, and discusses how electronic media - televison - has transmitted this limitation to contemporary oral debate too.
Electronic media do not tolerate a show of open antagonism. Despite their cultivated air of spontaneity, these media are totally dominated by a sense of closure which is the heritage of print: a show of hostility might break open the closure, the tight control . . . genteel, literate domesticity is rampant. Only quite elderly persons today can remember what oratory was like when it was still in living contact with its primary oral roots. (p. 135)
To which, in 2015, we say:
These aren't characteristics of written text, but of a particular context of mid-20th century textual production.
Similarly, when Ong rhapsodizes over oral language he completely overlooks the fact that the oral tradition explicitly shuts out some speakers. He describes how orality:
"...has generated a strong group sense, for listening to spoken words forms hearers into a group, a true audience, just as reading written or printed texts turns individuals in on themselves" (p. 134
But in truth, the oral tradition hinges on who is allowed to speak. Who has permission to address the group? And the audience has never been united - there were always those who crept into the shadowy corners, away from the speaker, hating themselves just a little more with each word. They just didn't have any right of reply.
Ong specifically discusses how the particular voice of the novel arose after women were admitted to vernacular schools; "practically oriented, for commerce and domestic affairs," and that women were less influenced by the "Latin-based, academic, rhetorical tradition." Yeah, less influenced, because they'd been shut out. The novel explicitly allowed women to hide their identity, and allow their words to speak for themselves for the first time.
Anyway, its a product of its time. There's a lot of good stuff, but its not a definitive text by any means. 3.5 stars rounding up.
It's interesting that Ong criticizes written debate as lacking spontaneity, and discusses how electronic media - televison - has transmitted this limitation to contemporary oral debate too.
Electronic media do not tolerate a show of open antagonism. Despite their cultivated air of spontaneity, these media are totally dominated by a sense of closure which is the heritage of print: a show of hostility might break open the closure, the tight control . . . genteel, literate domesticity is rampant. Only quite elderly persons today can remember what oratory was like when it was still in living contact with its primary oral roots. (p. 135)
To which, in 2015, we say:
These aren't characteristics of written text, but of a particular context of mid-20th century textual production.
Similarly, when Ong rhapsodizes over oral language he completely overlooks the fact that the oral tradition explicitly shuts out some speakers. He describes how orality:
"...has generated a strong group sense, for listening to spoken words forms hearers into a group, a true audience, just as reading written or printed texts turns individuals in on themselves" (p. 134
But in truth, the oral tradition hinges on who is allowed to speak. Who has permission to address the group? And the audience has never been united - there were always those who crept into the shadowy corners, away from the speaker, hating themselves just a little more with each word. They just didn't have any right of reply.
Ong specifically discusses how the particular voice of the novel arose after women were admitted to vernacular schools; "practically oriented, for commerce and domestic affairs," and that women were less influenced by the "Latin-based, academic, rhetorical tradition." Yeah, less influenced, because they'd been shut out. The novel explicitly allowed women to hide their identity, and allow their words to speak for themselves for the first time.
Anyway, its a product of its time. There's a lot of good stuff, but its not a definitive text by any means. 3.5 stars rounding up.
December 22, 2013
When I first read this book I was blown away by how I'd never considered what seems absolutely obvious: that the introduction of a technology like writing--whereby the relationship between people and their medium of thought, language, is radically transformed--would have profound effects upon the very way people think.
And then I read more, and thought about it more, and I think in some ways Ong seriously overstates his case, and in others he is just wrong. To support his claim that writing allowed for more abstract, neutral forms of cognition, he offers the list as an example, claiming that oral cultures "have no vehicle as neutral as the list."
But when you look at various cultures' earliest forms of writing, from Cuneiform to the Incan quipu, it was almost always some form of inventory, ways of keeping track of commodities; in other words, lists. In fact, these lists exist before the visual symbol system even technically becomes actual "writing" (transcriptions of utterances), e.g. the inverted "A" was the symbol for a head of cattle before it had a phonetic correlate.
He also posits that communication in oral cultures was more "agonistic," than in "chirographic" (literate) cultures, since spoken language is "closer to the human lifeworld" and written language is able to give itself some polite distance. He can be forgiven, however, since he wrote this before the advent of FLAMING.
And then I read more, and thought about it more, and I think in some ways Ong seriously overstates his case, and in others he is just wrong. To support his claim that writing allowed for more abstract, neutral forms of cognition, he offers the list as an example, claiming that oral cultures "have no vehicle as neutral as the list."
But when you look at various cultures' earliest forms of writing, from Cuneiform to the Incan quipu, it was almost always some form of inventory, ways of keeping track of commodities; in other words, lists. In fact, these lists exist before the visual symbol system even technically becomes actual "writing" (transcriptions of utterances), e.g. the inverted "A" was the symbol for a head of cattle before it had a phonetic correlate.
He also posits that communication in oral cultures was more "agonistic," than in "chirographic" (literate) cultures, since spoken language is "closer to the human lifeworld" and written language is able to give itself some polite distance. He can be forgiven, however, since he wrote this before the advent of FLAMING.
February 14, 2018
For those of us raised into the literate modern world, it is easy to forget the written word is a technology invented by human beings. Like all technologies, literacy has the potential to deepen our appreciation of the world and ourselves. But it also has the potential to alienate us from lived reality. While homo sapiens started speaking language as long as 60,000 years ago, it only began writing down its speech within the past three or four thousand years of its history. In that time our brains have been completely rewired from the world of our oral and semi-oral ancestors, making it harder and harder for us to grasp how they saw the world or what important messages they had encoded for us in our received cultures. We have almost completely lost the traditional idea of the spoken word as an “event,” coming instead to think of it as a visual “thing,” in accordance with our deeply internalized chirographic worldview. The implications of this shift have been monumental for every area of human life, but particularly our psychological and spiritual selves.
This book is a thorough unpacking of the technology of the written word and the monumental importance of the shift from oral to written culture. Reading the epic poems of Homer today, many of us, if we are honest, would likely find much of it curious, and even quaint. The apparent redundancies, aggregative descriptions and embellishments are very different from how we’d write such a story in the present. They almost seem to suggest something lacking about Homer, as judged by our own standards. But the truth is that Homer was a genius. The reason that we fail to understand the importance of epic lyric poetry, and cannot produce such poems today, is that these works were part of an oral tradition. They were meant to be spoken and heard, not read. The stitched-together and formulaic nature of much Greek epic poetry, and much oral composition around the world, was designed to accomplish the goals of a speech, and was created by minds rooted in orality, not the written word. The poem was designed for ease of remembrance and recall for both speaker and listener, in a format where writing and recording were not utilized for such a purpose. What appears to us as cliche was in fact a reflection of the genius of these oral works. Oral cultures were not less developed than ours according to some teleological or psychological scale, but rather simply different - capable of some incredible things that we are not, and incapable of others.
Before writing, the word was conceived very much as an action in itself. As Ong notes, the spoken word is an ephemeral phenomenon. It is not really a “thing” in the way that a written word has visually reified itself in our minds. We, who are so accustomed to the technologized visual word, have great difficulty conceiving of language as most human beings did throughout history -- as an “action” or an “event” occurring in time, rather than the recitation of some kind of label from a catalogue (the idea of such a catalogue of words with different meanings would have made no sense to an oral person). The meaning of the spoken word was also highly related to context and situation, not defined with the self-sufficient precision that dictionaries and writing now make possible.
Each time a word was spoken it was as though the world was being created anew. Every act of speech was an event in time that was unique and unrepeatable. With the invention of writing, what fundamentally took place was the transfer of the “word” from auditory to visual space. The implications of this for our experience of the world, and, most crucially, for our spiritual lives has been immeasurable. Ong writes:
”Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects. Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every direction at once: I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelops me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence.
By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together.
In primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in sound, with no reference whatsoever to any visually perceptible text, and no awareness of even the possibility of such a text, sound enters deeply into human beings' feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life. The centering action of sound (the field of sound is not spread out before me but is all around me) affects man's sense of the cosmos. For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center. Only after print and the extensive experience with maps that print implemented would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or world, think primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a vast surface or assemblage of surfaces (vision presents surfaces) ready to be explored. The ancient oral world knew few explorers, though it did know many itinerants, travelers, voyagers, adventurers and pilgrims.”
Our drift from being capable of seeing the world as one harmony into seeing it as a series of chopped up discontinuities is, as argued powerfully here, a product of our switch from aural to visual interaction with the world. The literary technologizing of the spoken word has allowed us a depth of interior life and introspection that was never possible with pure orality. But it also set in motion the process of our technology-driven alienation from reality. The cosmic power of the spoken word is something emphasized in the tradition of almost all religions. The Christian Bible refers to Jesus Christ as literally the “Word of God,” and says that “in the beginning there was Logos [the Word],” showing how important the advent of spoken language was to mankind’s spiritual development. In the Islamic tradition, the act of Zikr, or verbal remembrance of God, is centered on the transcendent spiritual power of the oral word as spoken by human beings. Speaking the name(s) of the Divine Reality in Islam is a powerful experience, but is immeasurably more powerful when remembering that each act of speaking it is a unique “event” taking place in the cosmos, not merely the recitation of a visual label that we have technologized.
The living power of the spoken word thus stands in contrast to the proverbial “dead letter” of written representation that we tend to think of today when we think of language. “The [written] word kills, the spirit gives life.” In another remarkable passage worth quoting at length Ong writes:
One of the most startling paradoxes inherent in writing is its close association with death. This association is suggested in Plato’s charge that writing is inhuman, thing-like, and that it destroys memory.... In Pippa Passes, Robert Browning calls attention to the still widespread practice of pressing living flowers to death between the pages of printed books, “faded yellow blossoms / twixt page and page.” The dead flower, once alive, is the psychic equivalent of the verbal text. The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living readers.’
In an effort to give a picture of the “pristine” pre-literate mind, Ong cites studies that were done among illiterate peasants in early-20th century Uzbekistan. What these individuals showed was a far lesser proclivity than we literates to look at the world in abstract terms, or to analyze deeply their own interior lives and psyches. From the interviews sourced, it is remarkable the degree to which these people “totalized,” the world sensing their own place in it by reference to the things and people around them. They did not, and could not, see themselves as neurotic “islands” adrift in the cosmos, because the nature of orality placed them very much into active relation with each other and the things around them. While literacy incentivizes analysis and introspection, orality incentivizes situational thinking. A question posed verbally can be understood in many profound ways, with many less words, than that which is posed in print. The word is seen in oral cultures as powerful, even potentially to the point of substituting for physical action, something that can still be evinced in art forms such as spoken word poetry and rap which have emerged from oral subcultures within modern societies.
So does Ong suggest that we should return to orality, or decry the invention of literacy as a negative force in human life? Not at all. Like other technologies, writing has allowed human beings to realize potentialities that would have been unimaginable in oral societies. But the important lesson that I think should be taken from his work is that we should consciously remember that the written word is indeed “a technology,” an invention by us, rather than the natural way of the world as we have been raised to assume. In remembering this, we can help grapple with the escalating phenomenon of alienation from reality that we are contending with as a society, including our loss of belief in transcendence and divinity - concepts that were always closely associated with the spoken word and auditory experience. By way of analogy, one could contemplate what the metaphysical implications would be if, centuries from now, human beings forgot that their powerful artificial intelligence systems were actually human inventions, instead falsely believing them to be a timeless feature of reality.
I could go on for much longer about this book. There are excellent sections dealing with how literacy and printing technology have rewired our experiences of time and space, as well as the way in which we speak and organize information. The contrast between inherently communal orality and individualizing literacy are important as well, as are the reflections on how texts and manuscripts were generally written to be read out loud until the age of mechanical printing. There is a lot to digest and reflect upon, and I found myself wanting to highlight almost every section at times.
Suffice to say, this was one of the most important and moving books I’ve read in recent memory. In some ways it is a dense text, but that density is greatly leavened by the fact that the argument is made in an economical space of less than 200 pages. For anyone concerned with the way that technology is impacting our subconscious and altering our experience of the world, this book is an absolute must. By stripping away the layers of technological obfuscation, including the things we have ceased to even recognize as technologies, we can get closer to “the real,” and thus evaluate our place in the world in a clear-eyed manner. This book is a vital tool in such an effort.
This book is a thorough unpacking of the technology of the written word and the monumental importance of the shift from oral to written culture. Reading the epic poems of Homer today, many of us, if we are honest, would likely find much of it curious, and even quaint. The apparent redundancies, aggregative descriptions and embellishments are very different from how we’d write such a story in the present. They almost seem to suggest something lacking about Homer, as judged by our own standards. But the truth is that Homer was a genius. The reason that we fail to understand the importance of epic lyric poetry, and cannot produce such poems today, is that these works were part of an oral tradition. They were meant to be spoken and heard, not read. The stitched-together and formulaic nature of much Greek epic poetry, and much oral composition around the world, was designed to accomplish the goals of a speech, and was created by minds rooted in orality, not the written word. The poem was designed for ease of remembrance and recall for both speaker and listener, in a format where writing and recording were not utilized for such a purpose. What appears to us as cliche was in fact a reflection of the genius of these oral works. Oral cultures were not less developed than ours according to some teleological or psychological scale, but rather simply different - capable of some incredible things that we are not, and incapable of others.
Before writing, the word was conceived very much as an action in itself. As Ong notes, the spoken word is an ephemeral phenomenon. It is not really a “thing” in the way that a written word has visually reified itself in our minds. We, who are so accustomed to the technologized visual word, have great difficulty conceiving of language as most human beings did throughout history -- as an “action” or an “event” occurring in time, rather than the recitation of some kind of label from a catalogue (the idea of such a catalogue of words with different meanings would have made no sense to an oral person). The meaning of the spoken word was also highly related to context and situation, not defined with the self-sufficient precision that dictionaries and writing now make possible.
Each time a word was spoken it was as though the world was being created anew. Every act of speech was an event in time that was unique and unrepeatable. With the invention of writing, what fundamentally took place was the transfer of the “word” from auditory to visual space. The implications of this for our experience of the world, and, most crucially, for our spiritual lives has been immeasurable. Ong writes:
”Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects. Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every direction at once: I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelops me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence.
By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together.
In primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in sound, with no reference whatsoever to any visually perceptible text, and no awareness of even the possibility of such a text, sound enters deeply into human beings' feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life. The centering action of sound (the field of sound is not spread out before me but is all around me) affects man's sense of the cosmos. For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center. Only after print and the extensive experience with maps that print implemented would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or world, think primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a vast surface or assemblage of surfaces (vision presents surfaces) ready to be explored. The ancient oral world knew few explorers, though it did know many itinerants, travelers, voyagers, adventurers and pilgrims.”
Our drift from being capable of seeing the world as one harmony into seeing it as a series of chopped up discontinuities is, as argued powerfully here, a product of our switch from aural to visual interaction with the world. The literary technologizing of the spoken word has allowed us a depth of interior life and introspection that was never possible with pure orality. But it also set in motion the process of our technology-driven alienation from reality. The cosmic power of the spoken word is something emphasized in the tradition of almost all religions. The Christian Bible refers to Jesus Christ as literally the “Word of God,” and says that “in the beginning there was Logos [the Word],” showing how important the advent of spoken language was to mankind’s spiritual development. In the Islamic tradition, the act of Zikr, or verbal remembrance of God, is centered on the transcendent spiritual power of the oral word as spoken by human beings. Speaking the name(s) of the Divine Reality in Islam is a powerful experience, but is immeasurably more powerful when remembering that each act of speaking it is a unique “event” taking place in the cosmos, not merely the recitation of a visual label that we have technologized.
The living power of the spoken word thus stands in contrast to the proverbial “dead letter” of written representation that we tend to think of today when we think of language. “The [written] word kills, the spirit gives life.” In another remarkable passage worth quoting at length Ong writes:
One of the most startling paradoxes inherent in writing is its close association with death. This association is suggested in Plato’s charge that writing is inhuman, thing-like, and that it destroys memory.... In Pippa Passes, Robert Browning calls attention to the still widespread practice of pressing living flowers to death between the pages of printed books, “faded yellow blossoms / twixt page and page.” The dead flower, once alive, is the psychic equivalent of the verbal text. The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living readers.’
In an effort to give a picture of the “pristine” pre-literate mind, Ong cites studies that were done among illiterate peasants in early-20th century Uzbekistan. What these individuals showed was a far lesser proclivity than we literates to look at the world in abstract terms, or to analyze deeply their own interior lives and psyches. From the interviews sourced, it is remarkable the degree to which these people “totalized,” the world sensing their own place in it by reference to the things and people around them. They did not, and could not, see themselves as neurotic “islands” adrift in the cosmos, because the nature of orality placed them very much into active relation with each other and the things around them. While literacy incentivizes analysis and introspection, orality incentivizes situational thinking. A question posed verbally can be understood in many profound ways, with many less words, than that which is posed in print. The word is seen in oral cultures as powerful, even potentially to the point of substituting for physical action, something that can still be evinced in art forms such as spoken word poetry and rap which have emerged from oral subcultures within modern societies.
So does Ong suggest that we should return to orality, or decry the invention of literacy as a negative force in human life? Not at all. Like other technologies, writing has allowed human beings to realize potentialities that would have been unimaginable in oral societies. But the important lesson that I think should be taken from his work is that we should consciously remember that the written word is indeed “a technology,” an invention by us, rather than the natural way of the world as we have been raised to assume. In remembering this, we can help grapple with the escalating phenomenon of alienation from reality that we are contending with as a society, including our loss of belief in transcendence and divinity - concepts that were always closely associated with the spoken word and auditory experience. By way of analogy, one could contemplate what the metaphysical implications would be if, centuries from now, human beings forgot that their powerful artificial intelligence systems were actually human inventions, instead falsely believing them to be a timeless feature of reality.
I could go on for much longer about this book. There are excellent sections dealing with how literacy and printing technology have rewired our experiences of time and space, as well as the way in which we speak and organize information. The contrast between inherently communal orality and individualizing literacy are important as well, as are the reflections on how texts and manuscripts were generally written to be read out loud until the age of mechanical printing. There is a lot to digest and reflect upon, and I found myself wanting to highlight almost every section at times.
Suffice to say, this was one of the most important and moving books I’ve read in recent memory. In some ways it is a dense text, but that density is greatly leavened by the fact that the argument is made in an economical space of less than 200 pages. For anyone concerned with the way that technology is impacting our subconscious and altering our experience of the world, this book is an absolute must. By stripping away the layers of technological obfuscation, including the things we have ceased to even recognize as technologies, we can get closer to “the real,” and thus evaluate our place in the world in a clear-eyed manner. This book is a vital tool in such an effort.
April 25, 2016
Extremely interesting. Some passages are fastidiously repetitive (one or two times I even guessed what it was going to say next) but it offers a lor of illuminating considerations about how and how deeply writing changed our world and our minds.
February 1, 2012
Walter Ong believes that writing is the single most important technology created by man, because it has had the greatest effect in shaping human consciousness. He believes that individuals and cultures can be fundamentally divided between those that are primary oral (have never known writing) and those that are literate. The effect of literacy is to greatly amplify certain modes of thought: analytical, abstract, impersonal. Though writing itself dates to roughly 3500 B.C. when it was invented by the Sumerians, something approaching universal literacy in advanced countries did not come about until the 19th century -- almost within living memory.
Ong's analysis draws heavily on the work of Eric Havelock, a classical scholar who focused heavily on the work of Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey were oral works, only written down long after the passing of Homer (and all the oral story-tellers who contributed to these tales in their re-telling down through the centuries). Striking features of this type of story-telling are the mnemonic techniques it uses, in particular meter and formulaic phrases. Ong extends these observations about mnemonic techniques to discuss speech in purely oral cultures, and how all of them tend to rely heavily on proverbs and other such verbal formulas as a way of retaining knowledge. Without writing, knowledge can only be retained in memory, and so techniques for reinforcing memory are widespread. As literacy becomes widespread, these memory techniques begin to fade -- proverbs begin to fade from the language, and memorization through repetition and oral performance becomes uncommon. Once knowledge and stories can be encoded in writing however, literature becomes more free-form, without the restrictive conventions (metre, formulaic repetition...) of oral epics. The store of literature grows explosively. At the same time, vocabulary increases rapidly, character development in literature becomes deeper and more subtle, and narrative plot structures become sustained and more complex.
One of the most interesting chapters of the book describes research by a Russian linguist in Central Asia in the 1930's. The researcher would give his subjects, illiterate peasants, strings of words such as saw, axe, hammer and log, and ask them to say which word did not fit. They couldn't do it. They would see all of them as being related to the working of wood, so all of the words were of the same kind. When he showed shapes to these same individuals, such as circles or squares, none of the them would use these terms. Instead, they would use the names of commonplace objects of the same shape -- for example, for a circle they would say pie, or plate, or barrel, but never "circle". They lacked the ability to express such an abstraction. When he repeated these same experiments with literate subjects, even if they were only barely literate, these difficulties disappeared. Very interesting ...
Ong is very much of a big thinker in this field -- and has clearly stood on the shoulders of Eric Havelock in the process -- yet I often long to see more evidence backing up his sweeping statements. He amply footnotes his sources, but his sources themselves seem to derive from more of a literary tradition than a scientific one, even when they purport to be products of the social sciences such as cultural anthropology. Experimental research evidence is almost non-existent, though the trove of anecdotal evidence presented is quite rich.
One fundamental research obstacle here is that oral story-telling is an evanescent art form: once told, it is gone forever, unless some intrepid scribe or videographer happens to be standing by. Still more difficult is ancient story-telling, which figures prominently in this book. Who is to say how the tales of Homer were once recited, and how much each retelling of the tale differed from its predecessors, before the "final" version was committed to paper? Add these difficulties to the fact that, today, cultures untouched by writing are remote, few in number and fast-vanishing, and you have a very big problem. This creates a fundamental difficulty: much of Ong's theory may prove unfalsifiable -- unable to be either proven or disproven. The necessary experiments were never performed, and the possibility of gathering more evidence is all but gone.
One piece of advice: skip the last chapter, "Some Theorems". It appears to have been machine generated by a structuralist/deconstructionist/textualist blather program, release 1.0.
Ong's analysis draws heavily on the work of Eric Havelock, a classical scholar who focused heavily on the work of Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey were oral works, only written down long after the passing of Homer (and all the oral story-tellers who contributed to these tales in their re-telling down through the centuries). Striking features of this type of story-telling are the mnemonic techniques it uses, in particular meter and formulaic phrases. Ong extends these observations about mnemonic techniques to discuss speech in purely oral cultures, and how all of them tend to rely heavily on proverbs and other such verbal formulas as a way of retaining knowledge. Without writing, knowledge can only be retained in memory, and so techniques for reinforcing memory are widespread. As literacy becomes widespread, these memory techniques begin to fade -- proverbs begin to fade from the language, and memorization through repetition and oral performance becomes uncommon. Once knowledge and stories can be encoded in writing however, literature becomes more free-form, without the restrictive conventions (metre, formulaic repetition...) of oral epics. The store of literature grows explosively. At the same time, vocabulary increases rapidly, character development in literature becomes deeper and more subtle, and narrative plot structures become sustained and more complex.
One of the most interesting chapters of the book describes research by a Russian linguist in Central Asia in the 1930's. The researcher would give his subjects, illiterate peasants, strings of words such as saw, axe, hammer and log, and ask them to say which word did not fit. They couldn't do it. They would see all of them as being related to the working of wood, so all of the words were of the same kind. When he showed shapes to these same individuals, such as circles or squares, none of the them would use these terms. Instead, they would use the names of commonplace objects of the same shape -- for example, for a circle they would say pie, or plate, or barrel, but never "circle". They lacked the ability to express such an abstraction. When he repeated these same experiments with literate subjects, even if they were only barely literate, these difficulties disappeared. Very interesting ...
Ong is very much of a big thinker in this field -- and has clearly stood on the shoulders of Eric Havelock in the process -- yet I often long to see more evidence backing up his sweeping statements. He amply footnotes his sources, but his sources themselves seem to derive from more of a literary tradition than a scientific one, even when they purport to be products of the social sciences such as cultural anthropology. Experimental research evidence is almost non-existent, though the trove of anecdotal evidence presented is quite rich.
One fundamental research obstacle here is that oral story-telling is an evanescent art form: once told, it is gone forever, unless some intrepid scribe or videographer happens to be standing by. Still more difficult is ancient story-telling, which figures prominently in this book. Who is to say how the tales of Homer were once recited, and how much each retelling of the tale differed from its predecessors, before the "final" version was committed to paper? Add these difficulties to the fact that, today, cultures untouched by writing are remote, few in number and fast-vanishing, and you have a very big problem. This creates a fundamental difficulty: much of Ong's theory may prove unfalsifiable -- unable to be either proven or disproven. The necessary experiments were never performed, and the possibility of gathering more evidence is all but gone.
One piece of advice: skip the last chapter, "Some Theorems". It appears to have been machine generated by a structuralist/deconstructionist/textualist blather program, release 1.0.
October 8, 2013
من أعظم الكتب في تاريخ البشرية: الشفاهية والكتابية
هذا الكتاب مثل مناجم ذهب مكسوة بطبقة رقيقة من تراب التفاصيل. ما ان تنبش قليلا باصبعك حتى تكتشف الذهب.
لقد ضاعف الكتاب على قدرتي التحليلية وفهم الامور المعيشية البسيطة. بعد قراءته ستفهم شخصيات الناس بصورة افضل, وستفهم طرق تفكيرهم, وستفهم كيف تطورت الحضارات.
قد يظن البعض اني ابالغ, ولذا فاني احيلكم الى تدوينة تلخيصية (لحوالي 30 تدوينة في مدونة مبادرتنا من وحي الكتاب). وتحوي هذه التدوينة التلخيصية (بعنوان:"التاريخ يكشف استاره ويحدّث اخباره- كيف قبضت الابجدية على تلابيب التاريخ؟ ") عشرات النماذج التوضيحية من انتاج مدونة مبادرتنا
http://mobadaratona.blogspot.com/2012...
للاطلاع على الكتاب (مع/ من دون تنزيل)
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6SRe...
هذا الكتاب مثل مناجم ذهب مكسوة بطبقة رقيقة من تراب التفاصيل. ما ان تنبش قليلا باصبعك حتى تكتشف الذهب.
لقد ضاعف الكتاب على قدرتي التحليلية وفهم الامور المعيشية البسيطة. بعد قراءته ستفهم شخصيات الناس بصورة افضل, وستفهم طرق تفكيرهم, وستفهم كيف تطورت الحضارات.
قد يظن البعض اني ابالغ, ولذا فاني احيلكم الى تدوينة تلخيصية (لحوالي 30 تدوينة في مدونة مبادرتنا من وحي الكتاب). وتحوي هذه التدوينة التلخيصية (بعنوان:"التاريخ يكشف استاره ويحدّث اخباره- كيف قبضت الابجدية على تلابيب التاريخ؟ ") عشرات النماذج التوضيحية من انتاج مدونة مبادرتنا
http://mobadaratona.blogspot.com/2012...
للاطلاع على الكتاب (مع/ من دون تنزيل)
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6SRe...
April 26, 2012
This book stunned me by revealing how learning to read and write SHAPES YOUR MIND and makes you a different kind of human creature than one who is illiterate. Illiterate people may be high IQ and very clever, but without having learned to read and write, their conscious experience is very different from those of us who are literate. It changes how we must look at ancient people: we can't assume they were "like us" but simply "without out modern knowledge." No, they THOUGHT very differently. Reading doesn't just add knowledge to your brain, it CHANGES how it works. See my commentary on Luria's "Cognitive Development" for more on this subject.
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August 6, 2013For me, the concept of writing changing a society's perception of the world is almost common sense. However, academic linguists are a funny breed, including those I count as my friends, and somehow they didn't seem to pick up on this. Oral societies function differently than literate (or "chirographic," in Ong's more PC language) societies. I can leave my girlfriend a note saying "pick up fresh basil at the store, I'll be home at 7." Just illustrated the situation. Next.
Of course, if what Ong did was simply to elaborate that. Rather, he digs into the myriad ways in which oral, chirographic, typographic, and digital societies evolve, including long-winded diversions into really entertaining anecdotes about everything from Plato's Phaedrus to the literary lives of Korean kings. I'll probably be annoying people at work cocktail parties with these for a while.
Of course, if what Ong did was simply to elaborate that. Rather, he digs into the myriad ways in which oral, chirographic, typographic, and digital societies evolve, including long-winded diversions into really entertaining anecdotes about everything from Plato's Phaedrus to the literary lives of Korean kings. I'll probably be annoying people at work cocktail parties with these for a while.
February 3, 2013
I don't normally "do" academic books in my Goodreads account, because, like I think most people, I don't usually read them cover-to-cover. I'm making an exception for this book, both because I did read all of it--finding it fascinating--but also because I think some of you working outside of academia might find this fascinating. This is a book I wish I'd known about when I was writing my dissertation--is this one of those things that everyone's read that I, in my dilettantish way, just didn't? Anyway, Ong describes the implications of the shift from oral cultures to written cultures in ways that I found head-explodingly illuminating, even on a great deal of Turkish cold medication. And, academic friends, if you're looking for a book to sort of shake up your thinking on a project--particularly one involving, say, theater or oral performance or the way that spoken language and sound attend writing--then you could do worse than spend a couple of hours with this book. Highly recommended and fascinating.
June 27, 2011
Authors of Non-Fiction do take note: THIS is how you impart information poetically, how you make your passion for your subject contagious.
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December 23, 2021I remember a friend of mine once giving me a pamphlet by Russell Means on how writing was a (“the white man’s”) way of destroying oral culture. It was a very silly piece of work, and might as if written by a “noble savage” colonialist. You might as well be reading Julius Evola.
Anyway, this is not the time nor place. Against what I might call a “nostalgia” tendency in interpretations of oral cultures, Ong argues that writing is not just an appendage to speech but something which makes it visual and raises consciousness to the level of thought proper. This is what makes this book so interesting—the charting of the innovation of writing with innovations in consciousness which produce both a higher level of sophistication in thought alongside greater alienation. Ong argues that Orality is not left behind by writing, for writing rather serves to enrich orality, or make it qualitatively different at the very least. Simply oral dialect will usually draw from a vocabulary of 1,000 words, while written language has exponentially more vehicles of expression. But the way in which writing locs speech in the visual field forever is irreversible, as is the tendency of written culture to foster the mind to speculation.
Overall, a fascinating book, though I’d have loved an entire chapter dedicated to radio, television, and the notion of “secondary orality” Ong brings up at various points in the world. But what we have here is enough to provoke some interesting reflections on the subject, at the very least. Makes me want to read more Havelock…
Anyway, this is not the time nor place. Against what I might call a “nostalgia” tendency in interpretations of oral cultures, Ong argues that writing is not just an appendage to speech but something which makes it visual and raises consciousness to the level of thought proper. This is what makes this book so interesting—the charting of the innovation of writing with innovations in consciousness which produce both a higher level of sophistication in thought alongside greater alienation. Ong argues that Orality is not left behind by writing, for writing rather serves to enrich orality, or make it qualitatively different at the very least. Simply oral dialect will usually draw from a vocabulary of 1,000 words, while written language has exponentially more vehicles of expression. But the way in which writing locs speech in the visual field forever is irreversible, as is the tendency of written culture to foster the mind to speculation.
Overall, a fascinating book, though I’d have loved an entire chapter dedicated to radio, television, and the notion of “secondary orality” Ong brings up at various points in the world. But what we have here is enough to provoke some interesting reflections on the subject, at the very least. Makes me want to read more Havelock…
November 15, 2022
Sözlü ve yazılı kültürün insanın düşünme biçimlerine nasıl, ne kadar etkili olduğunu örneklerle çok iyi anlatmış. Bolca not alarak okudum, keşke daha erken okusaymışım.
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October 11, 2020not the most careful scholarship but still a decent survey. should've been a blogpost.
May 20, 2022
Tuve que destacar con 3 colores distintos. 🥴 Un análisis sobre lo oral y lo escrito. Me hizo pensar sobre cómo las redes sociales nos pueden hacer retomar una oralidad similar a la prehistórica. Mansa volaita.
January 14, 2012
Excellent overview of the differences between oral and literate cultures. A bit dated now, but still sheds plenty of light on the subject; good in interaction with Margaret Lee's Sound Mapping the New Testament.
February 10, 2017
In 17 (school) weeks I won't have to do required reading like this anymore.
I'm thrilled.
I'm thrilled.
Read
December 22, 2019Ufuk açıcı bir kitap. -Hiç böyle düşünmemiştim- dediğim çok oldu. Dille ilgilenenlere tavsiye ederim
December 27, 2020
This motherfucker said yo mama jokes are within the African oral tradition.
September 11, 2022
This is a fascinating little book about how writing transformed humanity. Ong’s argument for the radicality of the change in thinking occasioned by writing is persuasive and thought-provoking, His argument is that writing converts the word from temporality to permanence, from an event to something more static.
The relevance for religion (which is why I read it) is that religion developed in an oral world, and the most famous of the religious texts were written using stories developed in an oral world and written down in a world in which orality was still a dominant mode of thought. Thus concepts like “the word of God” mean something quite different than they have been taken to mean in a thoroughly literate world. Words, therefore, began their lives in human mouths as active agents – they did things, giving them weight as something potentially magical. Now they are metaphors, pointing to something seen as more real than they are. Now they are labels, which is not how they used to be.
The ongoing quest to define religion reflects this shift. In pre-literate cultures, “religion” is simply a part of life with no clear distinctions from “society” or “culture” or “government” or “entertainment.” But in the increasingly literate culture of early-modern Europe, “religion” became defined, if fuzzily, as a separate box in which to put a collection of beliefs and practices that looked different from other categories of belief and practice. As Ong points out, definitions matter much less in an oral culture; even defining “tree” is “met with resistance” (53). Why is a definition even needed? (Further, it’s worth pointing out that defining a tree is not as easy as it might seem when we’re asked to determine what makes a tree over and against a bush.)
Another shift with religious implications is that words are embodied in oral cultures, but not in written ones. Likewise, literate cultures seem more likely to deemphasize the embodied nature of religion; ironically, as words become more material (“the thing-like repose of the written or printed word,” p. 75), religion becomes less so – or at least, the acknowledgment of religion’s materiality becomes sublated.
The relevance for religion (which is why I read it) is that religion developed in an oral world, and the most famous of the religious texts were written using stories developed in an oral world and written down in a world in which orality was still a dominant mode of thought. Thus concepts like “the word of God” mean something quite different than they have been taken to mean in a thoroughly literate world. Words, therefore, began their lives in human mouths as active agents – they did things, giving them weight as something potentially magical. Now they are metaphors, pointing to something seen as more real than they are. Now they are labels, which is not how they used to be.
The ongoing quest to define religion reflects this shift. In pre-literate cultures, “religion” is simply a part of life with no clear distinctions from “society” or “culture” or “government” or “entertainment.” But in the increasingly literate culture of early-modern Europe, “religion” became defined, if fuzzily, as a separate box in which to put a collection of beliefs and practices that looked different from other categories of belief and practice. As Ong points out, definitions matter much less in an oral culture; even defining “tree” is “met with resistance” (53). Why is a definition even needed? (Further, it’s worth pointing out that defining a tree is not as easy as it might seem when we’re asked to determine what makes a tree over and against a bush.)
Another shift with religious implications is that words are embodied in oral cultures, but not in written ones. Likewise, literate cultures seem more likely to deemphasize the embodied nature of religion; ironically, as words become more material (“the thing-like repose of the written or printed word,” p. 75), religion becomes less so – or at least, the acknowledgment of religion’s materiality becomes sublated.
December 16, 2022
Walter Ong cerca la verità oltre la verità.
Coglie elementi non banali: ad esempio il basilare aspetto scrittorio delle strutture narrative contemporanee, che nulla hanno a che vedere con quelle dell’oralità primordiale.
Ong, però, tende a non notare - e in malafede, perché lo sa - che la sua ingombrante teoria si basa su un presupposto che se volesse sul serio accettare, dovrebbe (e con lui tutto il filone correlato di studi) destituire l’intero apparato teorico che possediamo sulla lingua e sul linguaggio.
Ong ha come presupposto che ‘le parole significhino cose’ e che quindi il rapporto tra le forme, i significati e la realtà non sia un rapporto arbitrario ma giustificato da qualcosa.
Saussure e lo Strutturalismo sono fantasmi troppo ingombranti e torneranno da Ong come lo Spirito del Natale passato.
Coglie elementi non banali: ad esempio il basilare aspetto scrittorio delle strutture narrative contemporanee, che nulla hanno a che vedere con quelle dell’oralità primordiale.
Ong, però, tende a non notare - e in malafede, perché lo sa - che la sua ingombrante teoria si basa su un presupposto che se volesse sul serio accettare, dovrebbe (e con lui tutto il filone correlato di studi) destituire l’intero apparato teorico che possediamo sulla lingua e sul linguaggio.
Ong ha come presupposto che ‘le parole significhino cose’ e che quindi il rapporto tra le forme, i significati e la realtà non sia un rapporto arbitrario ma giustificato da qualcosa.
Saussure e lo Strutturalismo sono fantasmi troppo ingombranti e torneranno da Ong come lo Spirito del Natale passato.
June 22, 2020
The book provides a useful springboard for think about this issue, but some of its claims feel extremely dated at this point: the 'dichotomy' of orality v. literacy is overplayed when in fact much of ancient Greek cultural output comes from the interplay between them; the treatment of orality in Homer is a little condescending; the irony of Plato is misunderstood.
Nevertheless, if the reader is aware of the oversimplification of the dichotomy between orality and literacy, then its provocation can be quite helpful to formulate one's own ideas.
Nevertheless, if the reader is aware of the oversimplification of the dichotomy between orality and literacy, then its provocation can be quite helpful to formulate one's own ideas.
January 27, 2019
While a dense read, Ong's exploration of the differences in oral and literate cultures was fascinating and illuminating. It was groundbreaking in its day, and has since become a very influential piece of scholarship. I would recommend it to anyone who was interested in the topic; it requires close attention, but is otherwise very comprehendible.
January 22, 2019
A brief and interesting discussion of the ways that oral and literate societies (and especially their storytelling) differ. Sometimes or overstated, but that's to be expected. Some cursory nods to linguistics.
January 17, 2023
Recommended on a podcast. Excellent book. The change in thinking when writing was invented.
June 5, 2020
Though somewhat dated in terms of its applications to theory and calls for further study, Ong's fundamental work is still relevant in terms of how little its implications have yet to reach our chirographically-biased consciousness, let alone the second orality and electronic media relevance in terms of sociological and psychological impacts. Once we can see the scale of the cognitive paradigms shaped by our modes/eras of literacy and note the divides between them, we must therefore think and teach and learn across the paradigms, not presume that the assumptions of one hold true for the next. Ong spells these out with striking clarity, beginning with Homer but reaching Kazantzakis and others, then cites areas which are rife for investigation. Forty years later, this still feels fresh.
November 25, 2020
This book is part of my literature class, which was surprisingly pleasing to read. The accounts and arguments are precise and persuasive. It helps me to impact of written words to human evolutions as individual and in society. Highly recommended.
March 4, 2020
This book has been mentioned multiple times during my dissertation writing. Now I see the reason behind it. Simply enlightening. Orality and Literacy is such a classic guide to any scholar in the field.
I attempted to mail Professor Ong to let him know about the spacing error on page 19 and page 105. However, I later found out that he passed away long ago. It was the moment I realized that these errors are just the way he described literacy, dead. Orality exists in time but Literacy stays. The only way to fix Literacy is to burn the book.
It is mindblowing to know how Literacy reconstructs the human mind. I never noticed it before. I took writing lightly, as merely a way to represent language in a visible form, like Saussure, Sapir, Hockett, and Bloomfield agreed all together. This book is a slow read. I see more things every time I go through it again. My limited English level and knowledge only allow me to understand roughly 60% of the book, and yet it is still mindblowing.
#bicameralism
#rebus_writing
#pictograph_ideograph_rebus
#syllabary_script
#backward_scanning #glossa
#grapholect
#secondary_orality
#logocentrism #phonocentrism
#chirographic #typographic #textualist
#Homer
#rhetoric
Recommended Readings: https://jeenisbooksworming.wordpress....
I attempted to mail Professor Ong to let him know about the spacing error on page 19 and page 105. However, I later found out that he passed away long ago. It was the moment I realized that these errors are just the way he described literacy, dead. Orality exists in time but Literacy stays. The only way to fix Literacy is to burn the book.
It is mindblowing to know how Literacy reconstructs the human mind. I never noticed it before. I took writing lightly, as merely a way to represent language in a visible form, like Saussure, Sapir, Hockett, and Bloomfield agreed all together. This book is a slow read. I see more things every time I go through it again. My limited English level and knowledge only allow me to understand roughly 60% of the book, and yet it is still mindblowing.
#bicameralism
#rebus_writing
#pictograph_ideograph_rebus
#syllabary_script
#backward_scanning #glossa
#grapholect
#secondary_orality
#logocentrism #phonocentrism
#chirographic #typographic #textualist
#Homer
#rhetoric
Recommended Readings: https://jeenisbooksworming.wordpress....
March 15, 2023
A eye opening book on how the technology of writing has impacted humans and therefore changed how they view the world and make sense of it. The orality-literacy contrast is laid stark here and shows how the, taken for granted, human skill of literacy, rarely viewed as a technology, has irreversibly changed human perception. In some ways for the better but also for the worse.
Human communication is always an event and an intersubjective one at that. To speak is always to explicate your perspective. But to do so one must put themselves in the receivers shoes too. This is aptly described by the quote:
“I have to be somehow inside the mind of the other in advance in order to enter with my message, and he or she must be inside my mind. To formulate anything I must have another person in mind. This is the paradox of human communication. Communication is intersubjective.”
You know how they say you should never have an argument over text with your other half. This book precisely explains why. The medium of text and the act of writing renders your message inert and also adds an extra barrier in which to put yourself in the receivers shoes.
Overall a mind altering book that is dense but compact. One that will leave you constantly reflecting and in an internal dialogue with yourself as you’re poring over the visual text.
Human communication is always an event and an intersubjective one at that. To speak is always to explicate your perspective. But to do so one must put themselves in the receivers shoes too. This is aptly described by the quote:
“I have to be somehow inside the mind of the other in advance in order to enter with my message, and he or she must be inside my mind. To formulate anything I must have another person in mind. This is the paradox of human communication. Communication is intersubjective.”
You know how they say you should never have an argument over text with your other half. This book precisely explains why. The medium of text and the act of writing renders your message inert and also adds an extra barrier in which to put yourself in the receivers shoes.
Overall a mind altering book that is dense but compact. One that will leave you constantly reflecting and in an internal dialogue with yourself as you’re poring over the visual text.
Read
March 16, 2023Second read. This is becoming one of my favorite theoretical books.
Even more timely than ever in 2023. AI seems poised to transform human experience indelibly. Ong’s brilliance is not only in lucid interpretation of how technology shapes us as human beings, but how we can never go back to previous experience.
In the twentieth-century, with the advent of broadcast technology, we didn’t return to orality from literacy. Rather, we added a second-orality on top of print literacy. Just as previously print transposed writing, forever changing how humans relate to language and thought.
If the technologies of retrieval in literacy have outsourced our memories and freed us for discovery, what will it mean when discovery itself is outsourced?
Even more timely than ever in 2023. AI seems poised to transform human experience indelibly. Ong’s brilliance is not only in lucid interpretation of how technology shapes us as human beings, but how we can never go back to previous experience.
In the twentieth-century, with the advent of broadcast technology, we didn’t return to orality from literacy. Rather, we added a second-orality on top of print literacy. Just as previously print transposed writing, forever changing how humans relate to language and thought.
If the technologies of retrieval in literacy have outsourced our memories and freed us for discovery, what will it mean when discovery itself is outsourced?
Displaying 1 - 30 of 168 reviews