Write or Ong?

Alright. It's the home stretch. Time to get the hands dirty.

In the last post, I ended by trying to make an analogy for the connection between orality, literacy, and the digital humanities. The RSA video is a good example of how the digital humanities can be utilized in the future for educational purposes, and I'll talk more about that later.

Now it's time to talk about the Grand Master of oral studies:  Dr. Walter Ong. Ong wrote a book in 1982 called Orality and Literacy, which is his study on what happens to culture as it moves from a primarily oral culture to primarily literate one. For you language, post-colonial studies, oral communications, or other assorted nerds out there, it is incredibly interesting. But, for everyone who doesn't have time to read the whole thing, there's a very thorough review and summary by Art Bingham. I'll be taking some quotes from the book itself and the summary. The summary is using the 1988 reprint whereas I am using the 1982 original (citations, if necessary, at the bottom).

I suppose I should define, in my best terms, what makes an "oral" or a "literate" culture. When Ong speaks of an "oral" culture-- which is the way this project will coincide with it-- he means a culture that has never had any experience with written language, even its own. A literate culture, in turn, is one that is based primarily off the use of written text as its main mode of communication, education, and general transfer of information.

I'm just going to take Chapter 1 at the moment to give some direction. He begins by defining some basics about what an oral culture is and what a literate culture is, thereby setting up some boundaries for each to be studied. A few interesting quotes I found:

Ferdinand de Saussure...called attention to the primacy of oral speech, which underpins all verbal communication, as well as to the persistent tendency... to think of writing as the basic form of language...he thought of writing as a kind of complement to oral speech, not as a transformer of verbalization (5).

Language study in all but recent decades has focused on written texts rather than on orality for a readily assignable reason: the relationship of study itself to writing...Human beings in primary oral cultures, those untouched by writing in any form, learn a great deal and possess and practice great wisdom, but they do not 'study.' They learn by apprenticeship... by listening, by repeating what they hear... not by study in the strict sense (8-9).

In the beginning, Ong lays out some basics on how oral cultures operate with information. He brings in Saussure, who, as we've said, is important for the way in which WE (as a literate culture) view language and, as the next few quotes say, "words" in general.

 Writing makes 'words' appear similar to things because we think of words as the visible marks signaling words to decoders: we can see and touch such inscribed 'words' in texts and books. Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an often-told story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it (11).

 Though words are grounded in oral speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever (12).

Here, Ong introduces an idea that he goes back to in later chapters: the idea that, as literate cultures, we become almost completely visually based as opposed to aurally based. He challenges the reader to think of the word "nevertheless" for more than 60 seconds without thinking of the spelling out of the word itself. I couldn't do it either.

The visual part of our learning has lasting implications though, especially in response to the RSA video. Think about it... while that video has a strong oral component to it, it was still mostly visual! Drawings to represent the ideas and even text being written in-- "tyrannically" locked to the screen and your consciousness.

Ong's last point in the chapter is that the literate culture, right at the start, has a hard time even comprehending the concept of a primary oral culture. We always try to relate the oral culture in terms of the literate culture with terms like "oral literature" which he says is like describing a horse as a "wheelless automobile." "In the end," says Ong," horses are only what they are not."

He also goes on to say that literacy is the natural evolution of an oral culture. It slowly becomes aware of the possibilities that lie in embracing literacy. The problem becomes leaving so many aspects of a culture behind. He makes the argument, however, that "Literacy can be used to reconstruct for ourselves the pristine human consciousness which was not literate at all - at least to reconstruct this consciousness pretty well, though not perfectly" (15).

It is the leaving behind of orality to embrace literacy, and in turn the leaving of literacy to embrace digitization that I will be studying.

Works cited (just in case):
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Print.