Explore The New World

Walter Jackson Ong is a professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian and philosopher. Being a pupil of Marshall Mc Luhan, he studied the evolution of human consciousness via the history of communication by explorations everything from Renaissance textbooks to subway grafiity, poem etc.

Humanity has gone through a long journey from the purely oral universe of Homer (with Iliad and Odyssey) to the mixed oral and print world of Shakespeare (Othello) to the heavily textual environment of James Joyce to the multimedia carnival nowadays.

One of the most popular books of Ong is “Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word” (1982) translated into eleven other langueges. In this book, he attempts to identify the distinguishing characteristics of orality: thought and its verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy (especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population.

Walter J.Ong also shows two forms of orality: ‘primary orality’ and ‘residual orality’. Primary orality is the initial stage which used to be known condescendingly as pre-literate. It refers to thought and its verbal expression within cultures “totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print”.

Find out more information about Walter J.Ong Collection:
http://ongnotes.slu.edu/

References:
Ong, Walter J., “Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word” (second edition), Routledge, London and New York, 2002.walter-ong.jpg

Communication between the people has its own history. There are lots of kinds of communication: face to face, orally, written exchanges mediated by print, electronically mediated exchange and so on. How orality, literacy and electracydid has changed from time to time? How is the relationship between three concepts?

According to Walter J.Ong, writing is a technology and artificial. Firsty, writing related to the alphabetic system, the use of tools and other equipment such as pens, paper, inks, paints, strips of wood etc. As development of technology, writing also has related to print and computers. Writting has reflected the history, the culture and the life of human beings. If there is no writing, whether the human beings is able to capture cultural value from one generation to another. Besides, writing transforms speech. The writing culture is visual. While, oral culture has its own strengths: change power of words, express human body languages and powerful expressions.

Can we imagine the world has only oral or writing culture?