First half of “Orality and Literacy” by W. Ong
The assigned reading for this week was very dense and at
some parts of this book I had to actually go back and read over a second time
to fully comprehend what was being said. The general ideas in the book were
very interesting to me because I hadn’t thought about a completely oral society
before. Previously I had assumed that the cavemen wrote on walls and written
text has been evolving from that ever since. Ong brings very different ideas
forward about what a primary oral culture must be like.
One of the points that Ong makes in the book is that it is
almost impossible for a person from a literate society to completely understand
what life would be like in a primary oral culture. One of the concepts that he tried
to convey was that when you think of a word you almost can picture that word in
your mind. The literal letters that it takes to make that written word, even if
it is just being spoken, however someone from a primary orality that same word
is just a sound. There are no letters to it, it is simply some sound that you
can make yourself. “Literate people cannot have an image of a word by only sound like a primary orality person
can.”
After reading through this I started to wonder how a culture
could thrive with this kind of mentality. How are histories told and complex
messages passed along? Ong answers this by simply stating you must think
memorable thoughts. Meaning that a
person must think in mnemonics and formulas. An example of this means of
communication would be when a story is being told and a primary orality use descriptors
such as the brave soldier, the beautiful princess, the sturdy oak. Ong states, “An oral culture
may well ask in a riddle why oaks are sturdy, but it does so to assure that
they are, to keep the aggregate intact, not really to question or cast doubt on
the attribution.” For any of these techniques to really take hold a primary
orality speaker must repeat himself several times. During a speech it was
stated to fill in pauses with a repeated sentence in order to solidify ideas. “Oral
societies must invest great energy in saying over and over again what has been
learned arduously over the ages.”
Ong’s book has brought to my attention the ideas of how
powerful an effect the evolving media forms have on a society.
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