A brilliant book that provokes deeper thinking about the modern digital world
We often forget what life was like before literacy, when orality was the dominant mode of communication. In Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong explains how the shift to literacy fundamentally restructured human consciousness, altering not only how we communicate but how we think, perceive, and understand the world.
One might assume that an oral culture could not produce complex works, yet the ancient Greek epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, were oral creations. Ong explores the properties of orality that make such feats possible. Oral memory, for example, relies heavily on repetition and cliché to aid in retention and transmission. Phrasing is often aggregative; instead of simply saying “soldier,” one might say “brave soldier” to create a rhythmic and memorable pattern. Ong contrasts these properties with those of written language, illustrating how oral cultures developed sophisticated mechanisms for preserving and transmitting knowledge. This analysis effectively defines the lifeworld of thought before it was shaped by the permanence and fixity of literacy. It reveals an intricate architecture of oral consciousness that remains underappreciated in literate societies.
Writing fundamentally transforms communication by fixing speech in a physical medium, enabling us to remember events and ideas in precise detail. This permanence facilitates the extension of thought into more complex and abstract forms, which are essential to philosophy, literature, science, engineering, and technology. Literacy forms the bedrock of modern civilization, including digital innovations like the internet. It allows for the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge across time and space, creating a vast, interconnected web of information.
Ong explains how writing abstracts communication and removes it from the lifeworld. Writing and reading are slower, more reflective processes compared to the immediacy of speaking and listening in an oral performance. The writer works in isolation, crafting a message for a hypothetical reader who remains a fiction until the text is read. This introduces a degree of alienation; communication becomes less about direct human interaction and more about creating a one-sided dialogue. This shift is evident in the rise of the novel in the 1800s, a form of literature that emphasizes introspection, internal monologue, and the psychological development of characters. Ong suggests that this development may have contributed to a heightened sense of self-awareness in human consciousness. Writing also allows us to transcend time, enabling us to “hear” the voices of those long dead, to engage with thoughts and ideas far removed from our immediate context.
Ong describes orality as “natural” and writing as “technological,” but this dichotomy may oversimplify the relationship between the two. I suggest that orality, too, can be considered technological in a Heideggerian sense. Heidegger understood the lifeworld—the implicit domain of thought—as a mode of being he called Dasein. If we accept that all human activity involves some form of technological engagement, then speech itself can be seen as a technology—a tool for processing symbols embodied in sounds. This perspective challenges the notion that writing is the sole marker of technological advancement, revealing that orality has its own complex, systematic properties that facilitate human cognition and social organization.
Orality is not simply “pre-literate” or a lesser form of communication than literacy. It is a domain of knowing unto itself, capable of achieving complex design and cultural sophistication. Even today, oral practices persist and play a vital role in many societies, from oral storytelling traditions to the spoken word in contemporary digital media. Written words are ultimately transformed in the brain back into their original spoken utterances, illustrating that literacy is, in fact, founded on orality. Similarly, whatever comes next will not be simply “post-literate.” Literacy is built on orality, and post-literacy will be built on literacy. Future developments will likely further abstract communication. Programming code, for example, represents a powerful new form of symbolic processing, distilled from the inefficiencies of written speech. Code is a language of precision and utility, free from the ambiguity of natural language, yet it remains rooted in the human need to communicate complex ideas in writing.
Orality and Literacy is a brilliant book that provokes deeper thinking about its relevance in the modern digital world. The properties of orality—such as its emphasis on immediacy, communal participation, and mnemonic devices—could be applied today to analyze unstructured and conversational data in big data projects, such as crawling the open web or training artificial intelligence.
The rise of social media and digital communication tools is, in many ways, a return to an oral culture where immediacy, interactivity, and communal discourse dominate. Yet, these platforms also retain the benefits of written communication, preserving dialogue for future reference and enabling asynchronous interaction. This blending of oral and literate properties suggests a new phase in human consciousness, where the immediacy of oral exchange is paired with the permanence and scalability of written text. As digital communication continues to evolve, it is reshaping how we think, learn, and engage with the world. How this development will again restructure consciousness remains an open and compelling question.
~ Book review by John Miedema, with suggestions from an AI language model
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Published on July 10, 2012
Updated on November 9, 2024