Walter Ong
Orality and Literacy

Outline of this Guide

1. Overview
2. Readings
3.  Most Cultures are Oral
4. The Transition from Oral to Chirographic Consciousness
5. The Various Writing Spaces: Manuscripts, Typographic, Post-Typographic
6. Implications for the Study of Communication
7. Bibliography

Overview

• Walter J Ong (1912-) American professor of English, French, and Psychology.
• Well known as a rhetorician and theological scholar.
• Studied the transformation in consciousness which occurs when oral cultures become chirographic (writing-based).
• Identifies a "second orality" arising in Western societies with the advent of the telephone, television and new electronic technologies.

Readings

• Introduction and Chapter 1: The orality of language (pp.1-15)
• Chapter 4: Writing restructures consciousness (pp.78-116)
• Chapter 5: Print, space and closure (pp.117-138)
• Chapter 6: Oral memory, the story line and characterization (pp.139-155)
• Chapter 7: Some theorems (pp.156-179)

Most Cultures are Oral

• Ong reviews his own research and the work of others on the nature of consciousness in cultures which are primarily or entirely oral. Oral cultures constitute the vast majority of those which have existed in history and currently. Most cultures do not even have a writing system, much less a literature. "Of the some 3000 languages spoken that exist today only some 78 have a literature." (p.7)
• Even the cultures which have a literature are still frequently oral in their communication and outlook on communication, frequently mistrusting writing. (pp.96-97)
• The role of memory and public speaking is much more important in oral cultures than chirographic (writing) ones.
• The classical Greeks are a central case that Ong turns to frequently, as they were an oral culture that underwent the transition to literature in the formative period of Western philosophy. They have also been studied extensively by scholars of orality.
• Ong is primarily concerned with oral cultures and their transition to chirographic cultures. He has less interest in the subsequent transitions in chirographic cultures.

The Transition from Oral to Chirographic/Print Consciousness

• When a culture begins the transition into using written literature, writing is usually viewed with great suspicion and reprobation. Plato, for example, criticised writing as leading to poor memories and other failings in students dependent on it. Curiously, the criticisms of writing made in oral cultures are echoed in the criticisms leveled at the use of printing in the sixteenth century and computers in the present day. Ong sees this as part of an overall pattern in adopting new information technologies.
• Ong points out that writing is an artificial activity, but this is praise and not condemnation. Information technologies are not mere external aids but internal transformations of consciousness for the better. Writing heightens and uplifts consciousness in Ong's view. "Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance." (p.82)
• Text is very different from spoken discourse. Spoken utterance is always conducting in a specific context of an actual audience and setting, whereas the writer must mentally fictionalize the audience and setting their work is addressed to. Writing developed various psychodynamic techniques over time to adjust for these facts (the techniques of the dialogue, the frame story, and other conventions of fiction are examples).
• Writing leads to special dialects of languages, termed by Haugen "grapholects." (p. 107) Grapholects have access to resources which normal spoken dialects do not, much larger vocabularies recorded in dictionaries and enormous bodies of recorded literature, for example. English is a grapholect with more than a million words, contrasted to a normal spoken language of a few thousand words.
• Orality is tenacious, in that it still lies at the root of much of our thinking. We still give oral presentations, for example. Chirographic cultures are by no means entirely chirographic.
• Printing accentuates and speeds up the trends of literary culture. It leads even more to the transition of communication from an aural activity to a visual activity based on spatial relationships.

The Various Writing Spaces: Manuscripts, Typographic, Post-Typographic

• Print technology leads to many additional advances in writing spaces: spatial techniques for organizing words. The alphabetic index (an extension of the list, which was a first feature of writing) becomes a standard component of the book. The book itself is an even more tangibly thing-like thing than a manuscript, increasing the distance from utterances. Other protocols such as title pages and tables of contents are features of books and not manuscripts.
• Print has a much stronger sense of closure than handwriting. The manufacturing process necessitated the concept of a "final" version of text, with everything that evolves out of that concept, namely literary criticism of canonical versions of texts.
• The electronic world of post-typography expands things greatly, to the extent that Ong hesitates to get into the topic very far. Use of computers in composing texts is rapidly replacing the use of type-setting. The use of the many new aural electronic technologies (telephone, radio, sound recordings, etc.) brings on what Ong terms a "second orality". (p.136) This is a period in which orality once again becomes common, but in a form greatly hobbled by the inherited sense of closure found in print. Ong comments on how modern presidential debates are bland and tame compared to the agonistic struggles of the Lincoln/Douglas debates of 1858, when orality was much stronger in American culture.

Implications for the Study of Communication

• Ong concludes with some comments about how the new scholarship in orality has widespread implications for various disciplines. Some of the areas that he feels can fruitfully make use of the findings of orality research are literary history, Structuralism, Deconstructionism, Speech-Act Theory, social sciences, and philosophy.
• Ong observes that consciousness has evolved through human history by means of growth in the interiorization and distancing of the individual from their community. These interiorized stages of consciousness would not have been reached without writing. Ong further comments that the interaction between orality and literacy is home to some of our deepest spiritual notions (the notion of Christ as the logos, and the written bible are mentioned).

Questions

• Ong only scratches the surface of how the computer screen is similar and different from the writing surface. The ways in which the writing spaces of the codex changed consciousness are likely to pale in the ways that electronic information technologies will structure and channel people's minds in the present and future. Unlike the printed page, the computer screen is dynamic, yet still for the most part predetermined.
• Ong explicitly steers clear of the writing activity of today's highest paid literati, computer programmers, saying that computer languages have an artificial grammar (and implying that they are somehow less interesting or significant for this fact). (p.7) The activity of writing computer programs can be seen as the creation of a performative literature, and has enormous realms of subgenre which are not even seen as a form of writing by our current literary tradition. Yet these subgenres make up the performative works which most educated people in today's civilization today wncounter most frequently. The communally authored works of the Microsoft Corporation are read or encountered daily by more people than any other body of literary work in history.

Bibliography

Gronbeck, Bruce E., Et al. (Ed.) Media, Consciousness, and Culture: 
   Explorations of Walter Ong's Thought.  London: Sage Publications, 1991.