Orality and Literacy

This book blew my mind when I first read it twenty years ago, and it still seems fresh when I revisit it now. 

Our common assumption about language is that it represents the world, plain and simple. However, Ong’s book colorfully captures how differently language was experienced in the oral world before the rise of literacy.

Hearers empathized with speakers and participated in the scenes their words evoked. There was an immersive and tangible sense of commonality that spread through the shared experience of sound, which comes from within one person’s body and enters another person’s body. Language knitted the… show more.

Ong was a Jesuit priest and a professor of English literature with a profound knowledge of ancient cultures. He also had a bold thesis: the invention of written language performs a kind of “software rewrite” (NOT his phrase!) on human experience.

This book is his explanation of the differences between cultures dominated by the oral tradition and modern cultures dominated by the written word. Writing makes a whole set of things possible, like lists of arbitrary items, communication without seeing your audience, freeing ideas from reliance on fallible memory, and so serving abstract, analytic thought.

As well as making us… show more.