A response to Walter Ong's Orality & Literature

So who will we be when we're post-literate? The question seems a wee ridiculous: Once you're literate you can't go back to that old warm orality. But writing is technology, and technologies advance. Ong tell us quite convincingly that "more than any other single invention, writing has transformed consciousness," but he says it with an air of finality. As if writing will enjoy its place of cultural and cognitive primacy forever.

But what if that's not true? If writing and literacy have permanently changed us by giving us a repository for knowledge--a place to store the information that is most pressing to remember, and by doing so, freed us to think in abstractions, then what happens when new technologies allow us that same freedom but with fewer, or different, restrictions? We'll never be rid of text, because almost all recorded thought has been preserved in that form. But until recently it was the only convenient option. While that's still the case, we're getting closer to a point where memories and ideas will be just as easy to store in video or audio other electronic forms, and almost certainly easier to disseminate and share. Photographs have left the page. Words have as well. And one could argue that the breadth of human knowledge is shrinking, at least on certain of its edges--the availability of so much information online makes the stuff that's still moldering in distant archives that much more inaccessible. What good is it if it's written down where we can't find it? Like all those words spoken and then lost before we literacy gave us a way to trap them, ideas that are forgotten cease to exist. In thirty or fifty or a hundred years we'll have exponentially more information to sort through, much more of it in visual, non-textual form then ever before. That's the stuff that we'll be "reading." It's not just the content that is changing, but the way in which we read. Ong praises McLuhan for recognizing the "importance of the shift from orality through literacy and print to electronic media" but he does not expound on what exactly that importance is. Ong explores in fascinating terms the ways in which our understanding of the world is effected when we begin to organize our thinking through writing and print, which are predominantly linear and static forms of storing information. But what happens when we switch from a body of knowledge that is etched in stone or scratched out on paper, to one that is far more fluid? Texts move, as Ong reminds us, "variously from right to left or left ro right, or top to bottom, or all these ways... Texts assimilate utterance to the human body." But what happens now that we communicate in other dimensions, be it by layering meaning in new ways using Internet technologies or using the now-ubiquitous time and space-shifting tools of video and other visualizations? Ong shows us how the alphabet defined sound spacialy, but he doesn't allow for changing realities. Virtual worlds are redefining space. As our language moves both backwards--to an arguably more pictographic lexicon--and forward--to a communication through electronic media--how will it change the way we live in and understand our world?

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Ong argues that one major way that writing changed us was by introducing what he calls "autonomous discourse," the ability to receive information without being in the presence of the speaker. Literacy allows us to receive information quietly and in seclusion, and also to speak things without fear of being challenged. Reversing this trend would necessitate a return to pure orality. But while the physical separation from ideas at the moment of communication will not be bridged by space, it will be more frequently bridged by time. Ong tells us text has a vatic quality. He writes that "like the oracle or the prophet, the book relays an utterance from a source, the one who really 'said' or wrote the book. The author might be challenged if only he or she could be reached, but the author cannot be reached in any book. There is no way directly to refute a text." This is, of course, no longer true. Witness the mash-up; or tools that allow visitors to append information to any website, accessible by any visitor; or simply the way words can now be linked in a virtual space. Any web search of Orality and Literacy will eventually bring the curious reader to this response and those of my fellow students. That they don't show up on the first page of search results--at least not yet--does not diminish their immediacy. What's important is that they will show up. And that though Ong has passed away, we can respond to his words immediately upon reading them, and any who choose to respond to us can do so, too, and more importantly, can do so in the same space. Texts might remain "inherently contumacious,"* but perhaps no longer with impunity.

*Look it up, lazybones. I had to, too.