Orality and Literacy, a book by Walter Ong

Orality and Literacy, a book by Walter Ong

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New Accents. Ed. Terence Hawkes. (New York: Methuen, 1988).
This book was first printed in1982 and then reprinted five times. References to page numbers in this report are from the 1988 reprint.
About the author
Walter J. Ong, born in 1912, received his B.A. from Rockhurst College in 1933, his M. A. from St. Louis University in1941, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1955. He joined the faculty of St. Louis University as a professor of English and French in1959, and later became a professor of Humanities in Psychiatry in1970, holding all three positions until his retirement. He is well- known in the field of rhetoric for his work on Petrus Ramus and also for the subject matter of this book, how the shift from primary orality to literacy dramatically changes the way humans think.
General overview of the book
Ong pulls together two decades of work by himself and others on the differences between primary oral cultures, those that do not have a system of writing, and chirographic (i.e., writing) cultures to look at how the shift from an oral-based stage of cons ciousness to one dominated by writing and print changes the way we humans think. His approach to the subject is both synchronic in that he looks at cultures that coexist at a certain point in time, and diachronic in that he discusses the change in the Wes t from being oral-based to chirographic which began with the appearance of script some 6,000 years ago. In addition to pinpointing fundamental differences in the thought processes of the two types of culture, he comments on the current emergence in Wester n society of what he calls a second orality. This second orality, dominated by electronic modes of communication (e.g., television and telephones), incorporates elements from both the chirographic mode and the orality mode which has been subordinant for some time.