Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

The same arguments that are made against computers in the late 20th century were once made against printing by early modern scholars and against writing by Plato and his contemporaries in ancient Greece. The main arguments against all these technologies are that they are impersonal and unresponsive, that they make people rely on them despite being of questionable value, and that they weaken minds by removing the necessary exercise of memorization. Ironically, by the time objections are made against these technologies, the technologies themselves have already influenced society and cognition to such an extent that even their critics use said technologies to record, publish, and distribute their opinions. According to Ong, Plato and his contemporaries in particular would have been unable to construct their arguments against writing without having internalized the technology of writing in order to think such analytic and abstract thoughts.

Writing is a technology that requires tools and learned knowledge to access; it is not a natural part of human behavior, like speech. Ong claims that oral language is intrinsic and natural whereas writing is artificial, but neither state is inherently superior. Like other technologies, writing provides humans with the ability to develop their society and collective consciousness in a way that would not otherwise be possible.

According to Ong, it is not the case that any semiotic marking can be considered ‘writing.’ Writing is rather a specific technology that renders auditory speech into visual form. Information has always been encoded in physical or visual “aides memoirs,” as when animals leave biological deposits or early humans used notched sticks to keep records. True writing, however, is a relatively recent invention with unprecedented effects on human thought. The earliest known examples of writing come from the ancient Sumerians in 3500BCE. Writing records language, but can do so in a way that is ambiguous, particularly if the language’s script is poorly adapted to represent its oral equivalent. Ong believes that the best and most unambiguous form of writing is the alphabetic script.

Many scripts have been developed independently across the globe. In their early stages, these generally progress from codes and images to pictographs (stylized pictures representing the particular object they represent), then on to include ideographs (pictographs whose meanings have shifted or expanded to represent a related concept or idea) and rebuses (pictographs that are also used to represent homophones of the original image). Only once has an alphabetic script been developed independently, with the ancient Greek adaptation of the Semitic peoples’ Hebrew script. Alphabetic scripts are now used worldwide, but all are based on or influenced by the Greek model. An alphabetic script has an equalizing effect because it is easier to learn than more complex scripts such as Chinese and Japanese. In ancient Greece, the advent of the alphabet resulted in widespread literacy.

The onset of literacy is a gradual process. When writing is first introduced or innovated by a society, it is used in restricted sectors such as trade and bureaucracy and is often associated with magic or imbued with an intrinsic religious value. According to Ong, over time a “craft literacy” phase develops, wherein writing becomes a trade like any other, and skilled scribes undertake paid work reading and writing for a generally illiterate populace. The production and use of early writing materials was inconvenient and required technical and mechanical skills, encouraging the predominance of dictation as a composition method and contributing to the predominance of scribe culture. Only once writing tools developed sufficiently and alphabetic scripts made literacy more readily attainable did literacy become common and internalized enough to meaningfully affect Western society.

The lingering prestige associated with oral communication meant that written records were considered significantly less reliable than collective oral testimony for many centuries beyond the introduction of literacy. Ong notes that in medieval legal matters written documents often had a symbolic role equivalent to that of significant items like swords or seals. Forgery was common and oral history malleable, so it is difficult to judge the veracity of many old documents, particularly since they were rarely dated. Visual records and organizational methods like lists, tables, and charts were only possible through writing, although they were subject to frequent distortion prior to the advent of print.

Written words are isolated from extratextual context in a way that spoken words never are, requiring both the writer and reader to fictionalize each other from a distance in order to have meaningful communication. Early literature did this more explicitly than modern literature, with philosophy discussed as a matter of course, even into the 19th century, in the format of dialogues, stories situated within framing narratives, and authors addressing their readers directly. Self-reflective literary mediums like the personal diary were a very late innovation of literacy, only proliferating during the 17th century after the influence of printing. The irony and idiosyncrasies of modernist narratives such as James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake are reliant on the technology of the printed book.

Ong states that writing creates a sense of distance by removing communication from the chaotic context of speech, allowing for greater precision. The separation between knowledge and the person who knows it encourages greater introspection and existentialism, and “backward scanning” allows for revisions and edits impossible in oral communication. Restricted linguistic codes such as those observed in low-status dialects and vernaculars are perfectly apt modes of communication when the interlocutors share context. However, when such context is lacking, for instance in written communication wherein all necessary information and context must be explicitly recorded in words, a more elaborate linguistic code is necessary. Thus separate “grapholects” develop in the chirographic and printed sphere, generally out of more prestigious dialects of a language. These grapholects develop their own syntactic peculiarities and can sustain “magnavocabularies” far wider than the vocabularies of primary oral languages. Dominant grapholects tend to become the prescribed standard of their language due to their high prestige and superior written resources.

One of the major interactions between residual orality and the onset of literacy in Western traditions is the art of rhetoric. Western education and academia were dominated by rhetoric until the 20th century, with the primacy of rhetoric going largely unquestioned until the Romantic Movement of the 19th century. Rhetoric is the art of public speaking, which was recognized and practiced long before it was studied and formulized as an ‘art’ by the ancient Greeks. Rhetoric retained many characteristics of oral culture, being both formulaic and agonistic, and promoted these features in Western literature and culture long beyond the advent of literacy. According to Ong, the development of the modern novel, removed from the strictures of rhetoric, was hugely influenced by the contributions of lower-class and female writers who were taught in vernacular rather than private schools and did not receive the classical rhetoric-based education.

Ong states that the existence of learned Latin was another influential manifestation of the interaction between residual orality and early literacy in European society. Following the collapse of the Roman Empire and the diversification of vernacular Latin into the Romance languages, Latin remained the language of choice in academia, science, and education throughout Europe. Bolstered by the primacy of ecclesiastical Latin in the Christian church, Latin held a unique position as both a dead language with no native speakers and a lingua franca learned by millions. This learned Latin was an essentially written language, but retained the grammar and vocabulary of its old-world oral roots. And just as writing separates the author from their studies, so too did the use of Latin in technical spheres create a sense of removal and abstraction between thinkers and material that fostered modern styles of scientific study and philosophy.

Ong says that the transition from orality to literacy was a slow process that is not yet wholly complete, even in English. Lingering vestiges of “residual orality” remain in academic institutions and literary styles to this day. Until very recently, the art of rhetoric remained a central element of formal education, though its focus slowly migrated from the oral to chirographic sphere. Gradually, with the increasing internalization of print culture, rhetorically based education became eclipsed by pedagogical courses focused on the more literacy-based “3 Rs” of reading, writing, and arithmetic.