In Chapter 4 of Orality and Literacy, Ong solidifies the idea that we are visual learners in a literate culture, and, by seeing the word on the page, we have put a sense of finality on ourselves that is extremely hard-- if not impossible-- to shake off. That sense of finality is what is hazardous to the primary oral culture because it is the process of naming with something physical that is permanent. He uses Plato's dialogue in Phaedrus to make an example of how an oral culture often views a literate culture. Essentially, Plato says (or rather, has Socrates say) four things:
1) Writing... is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. (I want to come back to that last statement shortly).
2) Writing destroys memory...Writing weakens the mind. By relying on an external source for their internal deficiencies will, according to Plato, make people forgetful. Ong makes the same comparison of children using pocket calculators for multiplication tables. The calculators relieve you of mental work that keeps you in shape.
3) a written text is basically unresponsive. If you ask a question of someone who just said something to you, you will ideally get a response. Written text just stars mockingly back at you. Ong says that the same principle is said of computers "Garbage in, garbage out."
4) Plato's Socrates also holds it against writing that the written word cannot defend itself as the natural spoken word can: real speech and thought always exist essentially in a context of give-and-take between real persons. Writing is passive, out of it, in an unreal, unnatural world. So are computers (79).
Ong is making quite a few statements about computers here, if you haven't noticed. Now he did write this in 1982, but he knew what he was saying. He presents writing as a form of technology. It is a part of our social progress and, therefore, our progress in consciousness. He argues that just as writing "heightens consciousness," so will computers in a different way.
The way writing heightens consciousness is that it internalizes the experience of giving and receiving information. There is a separation between the author and the text and the text from the reader because the reader isn't usually there after the author writes.
But written words sharpen analysis, for the individual words are called on to do more. To make yourself clear without gesture, without facial expression, without intonation, without a real hearer, you have to foresee circumspectly all possible meanings a statement may have for any possible reader in any possible situation... (104)
By separating the knower from the known (Havelock 1963), writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the external objective world quite distinct from itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set (105).So what does that mean? Basically that the act of writing words, from an oral culture's point of view, sets them in that finality I keep talking about. That means the writer has to delve into their own understanding of what that word means and make sure that, along with everything arranged around it, the word is used in its absolutely correct context. Even then, the reader is often not around the author, so the reader may read into a different context.
All of that though-- for the writer and the reader-- is a growth in consciousness.
Ong also argues (condensing Chapter 5) that print is an even further departure from oral culture. The sense of closure in print is even worse than with writing. "Print encloses thought in thousands of copies of a work of exactly the same visual and physical consistency" (132)."
The next big thing Ong argues really ties it in: second orality-- what's to come after, or as an off-shoot, of literacy.
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