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Orality and Literacy
Walter J. Ong’s classic work provides a fascinating insight into the social effects of oral, written, printed and electronic technologies, and their impact on philosophical, theological, scientific and literary thought. This thirtieth anniversary edition – coinciding with Ong’s centenary year – reproduces his best-known and most influential book in full and brings it up to date with two new exploratory essays by cultural writer and critic John Hartley. Hartley These illuminating essays contextualize Ong within recent intellectual history, and display his work’s continuing force in the ongoing study of the relationship between literature and the media, as well as that of psychology, education and sociological thought.
264 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.
November 7, 2024
Incredibly fascinating little book. Its content is so rich and wide-reaching that I'd almost go so far as to say that all humanities scholars should have it on their shelves. You're absolutely guaranteed to learn a lot from it no matter who you are.
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...
Read
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.
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.
February 6, 2025
this book - more than McLuhan imo - is the 21st century media theory GOAT
January 8, 2026
قراءة رتيبة نوعاً ما، ثقل معها قلمي، إلا أني لا أحبّذ الاطلاع على كتاب دون تزكية مطالعته بتنبيه القارئ على ما ورد فيه، لذا فإن ما سأذكره في المراجعة أدناه منقول عن غيري مما جمعته أث��اء مراجعتي لأفكار الكتاب وآرائه:
أولاً: عرض الأفكار الأساسية للكتاب:
يذهب والتر أونج في كتابه الشفاهية والكتابية إلى أن الانتقال التاريخي من الثقافة الشفاهية إلى الثقافة الكتابية لا يمثل مجرد تحوّل في وسيلة التعبير، بل يشكّل تحوّلًا جذريًا في بنية الوعي الإنساني وأنماط التفكير. فالكتابة –بحسب أطروحته– ليست أداة محايدة لنقل الكلام، وإنما “تكنولوجيا” أعادت تشكيل العقل نفسه.
ويعرض أونج خصائص الثقافة الشفاهية، فيقرر أنها تقوم على:
• الاعتماد على الذاكرة والتكرار
• الصيغ الجاهزة والتراكيب الإيقاعية
• التفكير القريب من التجربة والمقام الاجتماعي
• اندماج المعرفة بالفعل والجماعة
ويرى أن العقل الشفاهي عقل تراكمي أدائي، لا يميل إلى التجريد أو التحليل المنفصل عن السياق.
في المقابل، يربط أونج بين نشوء الكتابة وبين بروز:
• التفكير التحليلي
• التجريد المفهومي
• إمكانية النقد والمراجعة
• استقلال النص عن قائله وزمانه
وبذلك تصبح الكتابة –في نظره– شرطًا لظهور الفلسفة النسقية، والعلم المنهجي، والمؤسسات المعرفية الكبرى.
كما يؤكد أونج أن الشفاهية لم تختفِ بزوالها التاريخي، بل عادت في صور جديدة مع وسائل الإعلام الحديثة، فيما يسميه بـ “الشفاهية الثانوية”، التي تتوسطها التقنيات الحديثة ولكنها تستعيد خصائص التلقي الشفهي.
ثانيًا: التوجه الفكري العام للكتاب:
ينتمي الكتاب إلى حقل دراسات الاتصال وتاريخ الوعي، ويتأسس على فرضية أن:
تطوّر أدوات التعبير هو العامل الحاسم في تطور طرائق التفكير الإنساني.
ومن ثمّ فإن أونج يقرأ التاريخ المعرفي للبشرية من زاوية الوسيط (Medium)، لا من زاوية الحقيقة أو المضمون المعرفي نفسه.
ثالثًا: نقد الكتاب:
1) نقد اختزال تشكل الوعي في الوسيط التقني
يُلاحظ أن أطروحة أونج تميل إلى إرجاع تشكل العقل الإنساني إلى الوسيط المادي (الكلام أو الكتابة)، بما يُضعف حضور المصادر المعرفية الأخرى، وعلى رأسها الوحي والفطرة.
في التصور الإسلامي، لا يُعدّ الوسيط منشئًا للوعي، بل خادمًا للمعنى؛ إذ يُقدَّم القلب والعقل بوصفهما محلّ الفهم قبل أي تقنية تعبيرية.
2) نقد التقليل الضمني من القدرة المعرفية للشفاهية
على الرغم من تأكيد أونج أن الشفاهية ليست “بدائية”، إلا أن وصفه لها بأنها غير تجريدية أو تحليلية يواجه إشكالًا عند مقارنته بالتجربة الإسلامية الأولى.
فالقرآن الكريم نزل في بيئة شفاهية، وحُفظ في الصدور قبل السطور، ومع ذلك أنتج:
• تصورًا عقديًا بالغ العمق
• منظومة تشريعية دقيقة
• بنية مفهومية عالية التجريد
قال تعالى: {بَلْ هُوَ آيَاتٌ بَيِّنَاتٌ فِي صُدُورِ الَّذِينَ أُوتُوا الْعِلْمَ} [العنكبوت: 49]
وهو ما يدل على أن الشفاهية المنضبطة بالوحي لا تعيق التحليل ولا التجريد، بل قد تسبق الكتابة في إنتاج المعنى.
3) غياب البعد المعياري والأخلاقي للمعرفة
ينظر أونج إلى المعرفة من زاوية تطورها البنيوي والتقني، دون تمييز قيمي بين أنماط المعرفة وآثارها الأخلاقية.
أما في المنظور الإسلامي، فالعلم يُقيَّم من حيث:
• نفعه
• أثره
• موقعه من الهداية
وفي الحديث الصحيح: «اللَّهُمَّ إِنِّي أَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنْ عِلْمٍ لَا يَنْفَعُ» رواه مسلم (2722)
ومن ثمّ فإن توسّع الكتابة وانتشارها لا يُعدّ في ذاته ارتقاءً إنسانيًا ما لم يُضبط بمعيار الحق.
4) مركزية النموذج الغربي في التحليل
يعتمد أونج في تحليله على التجربة اليونانية والأوروبية، ثم يُعمّم نتائجها على “الإنسان” مطلقًا، وهو ما يُعدّ تعميمًا غير منضبط.
فالحضارة الإسلامية قدّمت نموذجًا مركّبًا:
• شفاهية عالية الضبط (الإسناد)
• وكتابية دقيقة (التدوين)
• دون أن تجعل الكتابة شرطًا سابقًا للفهم أو التحليل
هذا، وصلى الله وسلم على نبينا محمد وعلى آله وصحبه أجمعين.
أولاً: عرض الأفكار الأساسية للكتاب:
يذهب والتر أونج في كتابه الشفاهية والكتابية إلى أن الانتقال التاريخي من الثقافة الشفاهية إلى الثقافة الكتابية لا يمثل مجرد تحوّل في وسيلة التعبير، بل يشكّل تحوّلًا جذريًا في بنية الوعي الإنساني وأنماط التفكير. فالكتابة –بحسب أطروحته– ليست أداة محايدة لنقل الكلام، وإنما “تكنولوجيا” أعادت تشكيل العقل نفسه.
ويعرض أونج خصائص الثقافة الشفاهية، فيقرر أنها تقوم على:
• الاعتماد على الذاكرة والتكرار
• الصيغ الجاهزة والتراكيب الإيقاعية
• التفكير القريب من التجربة والمقام الاجتماعي
• اندماج المعرفة بالفعل والجماعة
ويرى أن العقل الشفاهي عقل تراكمي أدائي، لا يميل إلى التجريد أو التحليل المنفصل عن السياق.
في المقابل، يربط أونج بين نشوء الكتابة وبين بروز:
• التفكير التحليلي
• التجريد المفهومي
• إمكانية النقد والمراجعة
• استقلال النص عن قائله وزمانه
وبذلك تصبح الكتابة –في نظره– شرطًا لظهور الفلسفة النسقية، والعلم المنهجي، والمؤسسات المعرفية الكبرى.
كما يؤكد أونج أن الشفاهية لم تختفِ بزوالها التاريخي، بل عادت في صور جديدة مع وسائل الإعلام الحديثة، فيما يسميه بـ “الشفاهية الثانوية”، التي تتوسطها التقنيات الحديثة ولكنها تستعيد خصائص التلقي الشفهي.
ثانيًا: التوجه الفكري العام للكتاب:
ينتمي الكتاب إلى حقل دراسات الاتصال وتاريخ الوعي، ويتأسس على فرضية أن:
تطوّر أدوات التعبير هو العامل الحاسم في تطور طرائق التفكير الإنساني.
ومن ثمّ فإن أونج يقرأ التاريخ المعرفي للبشرية من زاوية الوسيط (Medium)، لا من زاوية الحقيقة أو المضمون المعرفي نفسه.
ثالثًا: نقد الكتاب:
1) نقد اختزال تشكل الوعي في الوسيط التقني
يُلاحظ أن أطروحة أونج تميل إلى إرجاع تشكل العقل الإنساني إلى الوسيط المادي (الكلام أو الكتابة)، بما يُضعف حضور المصادر المعرفية الأخرى، وعلى رأسها الوحي والفطرة.
في التصور الإسلامي، لا يُعدّ الوسيط منشئًا للوعي، بل خادمًا للمعنى؛ إذ يُقدَّم القلب والعقل بوصفهما محلّ الفهم قبل أي تقنية تعبيرية.
2) نقد التقليل الضمني من القدرة المعرفية للشفاهية
على الرغم من تأكيد أونج أن الشفاهية ليست “بدائية”، إلا أن وصفه لها بأنها غير تجريدية أو تحليلية يواجه إشكالًا عند مقارنته بالتجربة الإسلامية الأولى.
فالقرآن الكريم نزل في بيئة شفاهية، وحُفظ في الصدور قبل السطور، ومع ذلك أنتج:
• تصورًا عقديًا بالغ العمق
• منظومة تشريعية دقيقة
• بنية مفهومية عالية التجريد
قال تعالى: {بَلْ هُوَ آيَاتٌ بَيِّنَاتٌ فِي صُدُورِ الَّذِينَ أُوتُوا الْعِلْمَ} [العنكبوت: 49]
وهو ما يدل على أن الشفاهية المنضبطة بالوحي لا تعيق التحليل ولا التجريد، بل قد تسبق الكتابة في إنتاج المعنى.
3) غياب البعد المعياري والأخلاقي للمعرفة
ينظر أونج إلى المعرفة من زاوية تطورها البنيوي والتقني، دون تمييز قيمي بين أنماط المعرفة وآثارها الأخلاقية.
أما في المنظور الإسلامي، فالعلم يُقيَّم من حيث:
• نفعه
• أثره
• موقعه من الهداية
وفي الحديث الصحيح: «اللَّهُمَّ إِنِّي أَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنْ عِلْمٍ لَا يَنْفَعُ» رواه مسلم (2722)
ومن ثمّ فإن توسّع الكتابة وانتشارها لا يُعدّ في ذاته ارتقاءً إنسانيًا ما لم يُضبط بمعيار الحق.
4) مركزية النموذج الغربي في التحليل
يعتمد أونج في تحليله على التجربة اليونانية والأوروبية، ثم يُعمّم نتائجها على “الإنسان” مطلقًا، وهو ما يُعدّ تعميمًا غير منضبط.
فالحضارة الإسلامية قدّمت نموذجًا مركّبًا:
• شفاهية عالية الضبط (الإسناد)
• وكتابية دقيقة (التدوين)
• دون أن تجعل الكتابة شرطًا سابقًا للفهم أو التحليل
هذا، وصلى الله وسلم على نبينا محمد وعلى آله وصحبه أجمعين.
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.
December 27, 2020
This motherfucker said yo mama jokes are within the African oral tradition.
Read
October 11, 2020not the most careful scholarship but still a decent survey. should've been a blogpost.
January 18, 2025
bro really mogged mcluhan with this one
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.
March 8, 2025
4 years ago, an anon commenter recommended this book on my still niche substack. 4 years later, I finally got around to reading it (after many others recommended it as well)
Ong gives an incredible anthology of what a truly oral culture is like, which is often hard for literary creatures to imagine.
It was particularly timely to read it while also going through apologetics again and thinking about the historicity of the gospel texts, which are literary residues of early oral Christian traditions.
Ong gives an incredible anthology of what a truly oral culture is like, which is often hard for literary creatures to imagine.
It was particularly timely to read it while also going through apologetics again and thinking about the historicity of the gospel texts, which are literary residues of early oral Christian traditions.
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.
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.
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
November 19, 2025
Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982) remains one of the most influential theoretical interventions in media studies, intellectual history, and the anthropology of communication. Written with remarkable interdisciplinary breadth, the book synthesizes linguistics, psychology, literary theory, religious studies, and cultural history into a unified account of how communication technologies transform cognition and social organisation. Ong’s central thesis—that the shift from primary orality to literacy, and later to secondary orality mediated by electronic media, fundamentally restructures consciousness—has become foundational to subsequent debates about the relationship between media forms and human thought.
Ong begins by drawing a distinction between primary oral cultures—societies with no exposure to writing—and secondary oral cultures, those shaped by electronic communication that relies upon written technologies for its infrastructure. His treatment of primary orality is one of the book’s enduring strengths. Relying on ethnographic scholarship and classical studies, Ong argues that oral thought is necessarily additive, aggregative, situational, participatory, and deeply embedded in mnemonic structures. Oral cultures depend on formulaic expression, rhythmic patterns, and narrative coherence in order to preserve knowledge. The book’s discussion of Homeric epic, oral memory techniques, and the social functions of storytelling powerfully demonstrates how communicative constraints shape cultural forms.
The transition to literacy, for Ong, is not merely technological but epistemic. Writing and especially alphabetic writing introduce processes of abstraction, analytic separation, and objectification. Literacy fosters interiority, distancing, and the possibility of sustained logical argument. Ong’s controversial but influential claim is that writing “restructures consciousness”—that cognitive habits evolve in response to the affordances of textuality. Although some scholars, particularly anthropologists wary of technological determinism, have critiqued this move, Ong’s nuanced discussion shows that he views writing not as a unilateral causal force but as a technology that interacts with social and cultural systems.
One of the book’s most compelling chapters examines the emergence of print and the subsequent rationalisation of knowledge. Ong highlights how print culture stabilises texts, promotes standardisation, and generates a new sense of private, silent reading. The argument anticipates later work by Benedict Anderson, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and others on the political ramifications of print capitalism and textual fixity.
Ong’s concept of secondary orality—the electronically mediated return of oral modes of communication—continues to resonate in contemporary debates about digital media. Although writing in the early years of broadcast technology, Ong’s insights presciently describe patterns that now seem characteristic of online and social media environments: immediacy, simultaneity, participatory discourse, and a renewed emphasis on communal interaction. His work thus offers an important theoretical bridge between traditional oral scholarship and twenty-first century digital studies.
Nevertheless, Orality and Literacy is not without limitations. At times, Ong’s sweeping generalizations risk flattening cultural variation, and some of his claims about “oral mentality” have been challenged as overly dichotomous or insufficiently attentive to the hybridity of communicative practices. Furthermore, the book’s reliance on Western intellectual history and its privileging of alphabetic literacy may narrow its applicability to non-alphabetic traditions. Yet these limitations do not undermine the book’s core contributions; instead, they invite productive elaboration and critique.
Orality and Literacy remains a seminal text that reshaped scholarly understanding of the interplay between media technologies and human cognition. Its arguments continue to inform research in digital humanities, communication studies, and comparative cultural analysis. For readers seeking an intellectually rich and historically informed account of how writing and speech shape human experience, Ong’s book remains indispensable.
GPT
Ong begins by drawing a distinction between primary oral cultures—societies with no exposure to writing—and secondary oral cultures, those shaped by electronic communication that relies upon written technologies for its infrastructure. His treatment of primary orality is one of the book’s enduring strengths. Relying on ethnographic scholarship and classical studies, Ong argues that oral thought is necessarily additive, aggregative, situational, participatory, and deeply embedded in mnemonic structures. Oral cultures depend on formulaic expression, rhythmic patterns, and narrative coherence in order to preserve knowledge. The book’s discussion of Homeric epic, oral memory techniques, and the social functions of storytelling powerfully demonstrates how communicative constraints shape cultural forms.
The transition to literacy, for Ong, is not merely technological but epistemic. Writing and especially alphabetic writing introduce processes of abstraction, analytic separation, and objectification. Literacy fosters interiority, distancing, and the possibility of sustained logical argument. Ong’s controversial but influential claim is that writing “restructures consciousness”—that cognitive habits evolve in response to the affordances of textuality. Although some scholars, particularly anthropologists wary of technological determinism, have critiqued this move, Ong’s nuanced discussion shows that he views writing not as a unilateral causal force but as a technology that interacts with social and cultural systems.
One of the book’s most compelling chapters examines the emergence of print and the subsequent rationalisation of knowledge. Ong highlights how print culture stabilises texts, promotes standardisation, and generates a new sense of private, silent reading. The argument anticipates later work by Benedict Anderson, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and others on the political ramifications of print capitalism and textual fixity.
Ong’s concept of secondary orality—the electronically mediated return of oral modes of communication—continues to resonate in contemporary debates about digital media. Although writing in the early years of broadcast technology, Ong’s insights presciently describe patterns that now seem characteristic of online and social media environments: immediacy, simultaneity, participatory discourse, and a renewed emphasis on communal interaction. His work thus offers an important theoretical bridge between traditional oral scholarship and twenty-first century digital studies.
Nevertheless, Orality and Literacy is not without limitations. At times, Ong’s sweeping generalizations risk flattening cultural variation, and some of his claims about “oral mentality” have been challenged as overly dichotomous or insufficiently attentive to the hybridity of communicative practices. Furthermore, the book’s reliance on Western intellectual history and its privileging of alphabetic literacy may narrow its applicability to non-alphabetic traditions. Yet these limitations do not undermine the book’s core contributions; instead, they invite productive elaboration and critique.
Orality and Literacy remains a seminal text that reshaped scholarly understanding of the interplay between media technologies and human cognition. Its arguments continue to inform research in digital humanities, communication studies, and comparative cultural analysis. For readers seeking an intellectually rich and historically informed account of how writing and speech shape human experience, Ong’s book remains indispensable.
GPT
December 12, 2025
Walter Ong é um dos grandes teóricos da oralidade. Mas eu nunca pensei que fosse encontrar um livro dele em português e ainda mais em um sebo. Encontrei no Sebo Elemental, em Florianópolis. O valor foi alto, mas neste livro, encontrei alguns insight bem interessantes para desenvolver mais uma teoria que vi em outro lugar. É curioso como este livro foi escrito na década de 1980 e publicado no Brasil na década de 1990 e ainda assim conseguimos perceber essas teorias sendo aplicadas até mesmo na memética e na plataformização digital. É curioso como a midiatização consegue mesclar características da cultura escrita e da oralidade e como, me parece, estamos retornando cada vez mais à uma dinâmica mais oral que escrita, mas com um conteúdo cada vez mais pobre. Estamos retornando a um estágio oral de tribo global e estamos repetindo memeticamente muitas narrativas com base em fake news da internet. Mas, como Ong defende, precisamos entender que oralidade não é sinônimo de primitivismo, mas de uma forma corporalizada de expressão, que se fia muito mais na memória do que no efeito sobre o leitor.
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.
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