53 pages • 1 hour read
Walter J. OngOrality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5: “Print, Space and Closure”
Chapter 5, Section 1 Summary: “Hearing-Dominance Yields to Sight-Dominance”
The technology of printing has been in use for many centuries. However, it was the 15th-century German invention of the printing press with moveable alphabetic type that saw “print culture” truly develop as the next stage in literacy. This Printing Revolution saw the mass production of identical copies of consumer-orientated texts, reinforcing the effects of literacy on cognition, society, and culture. Print had a significant influence on the shift from orality to literacy, as it led to the predominance of the visual sphere as a medium for communication in lieu of the auditory. Printed works were more heavily edited, better organized, and overall more easily legible than manuscripts. This, as well as the increased availability of reading material, led to the widespread adoption of rapid silent reading as the primary means to interact with a text, rather than the performance of reading aloud.
Chapter 5, Section 2 Summary: “Space and Meaning”
According to Ong, print reinforced the reconstitution of oral words into visual space and led to the following innovations:
1) Indexes
Printed texts were far more visually organized than handwritten texts, including new formats geared toward the visual retrieval of information such as lists, indexes, labels, as well as novel organizational markers like title pages. These features, along with the large-scale production of identical copies, contributed to the perception of books as physical objects containing information rather than as recordings of oral utterances.
2) Meaningful surface
With the printing press allowing for the rapid creation of high-fidelity copies, books became a primary medium for sharing detailed noetic information. Modern science was greatly aided by this new availability of repeatable images and precise text, and this technical hyper-visual information also contributed to the rapid technological advancement of the Industrial Revolution.
3) Typographic space
The blank space in a printed book took on new significance by connecting words positionally and visually. Complex charts could be created and published in various scientific fields, and poets experimented with typography to express kinesthetic relations between words and letters.
Chapter 5, Section 3 Summary: “More Diffuse Effects”
Western society has been enormously affected by the introduction and integration of printing technology. Print allowed for the large scale quantification and collection of knowledge, the amassing of dictionaries and unprecedented magnavocabularies, and the prescriptivist preoccupation with “correct” grammar. The reinforcement and greater internalization of literacy contributed to the drift toward individualism in Western culture as well as the supplantation of rhetoric as the core of pedagogy and academia. With the advent and popularization of print there also came the concepts of personal privacy and the private ownership of words, leading to ideas of both copyright and plagiarism.
Chapter 5, Section 4 Summary: “Print and Closure: Intertextuality”
The communication technology of print also influenced the Western verbal artform of the narrative. Print encouraged the standardization of the fixed point of view and the self-containment of the storyline, leading to a tendency for climactic resolution and closure in modern narratives. Tight plotlines were alien to lengthy narratives prior to literacy, and rare prior to print. Whereas manuscripts took intertextuality for granted and functioned somewhat like a dialogue, printed texts give the impression of being complete and definitive. Intertextuality therefore became a matter of deliberate study, such that it gave rise to literary theories such as Formalism and New Criticism. Modern textbooks originated from the French scholar Ramus in the 16th century, reflecting the growing predominance of the literacy-based mode of education resulting from print technology.
Chapter 5, Section 5 Summary: “Post-Typography: Electronics”
According to Ong, recent advancements in technology have reinforced the literacy-based outlook of modern society, while also bringing about a “secondary orality.” This new orality differs from primary orality in that the cognitive and social effects of literacy are still present, and the use of context-free audio technology like radios and recordings means that the interactive element of oral communication has shifted. Ong notes that the full relationship between modern technology and the orality-literacy dynamic is beyond the scope of this book.
Chapter 5 Analysis
This chapter deals primarily with the theme of The Impact of Communication Technologies on Human Interaction and Cultural Development. Ong describes how the advent and popularization of the moveable alphabetic type printing press—the Gutenberg press as it is commonly known—led to the Printing Revolution of the 15th to 18th centuries. Printing is a communication technology of which the impact is second only to that of chirographic writing. Ong details how print increased the cognitive and social impacts of writing by leading to a greater internalization of writing and its associated effects. The importance of the Printing Revolution is already an established fact in literary circles, so this is not a theorem that Ong puts much effort into proving. Instead, he emphasizes the link between print and literacy, showing that printing technology acted as a further push toward visual communication over audio and literacy over orality.
This is the chapter of the book that appears most out of date to a modern reader. Although all of Ong’s historical information is correct and still pertinent, his discussions of post-typographic technologies are extremely telling of the context in which he was writing. Electronic communication technologies have advanced in leaps and bounds since the 1980s, with the digital revolution and the advent of social media, mobile phone communications, and the wider internet far eclipsing the impact of analog technologies like the television and radio. Communication technologies have advanced with unparalleled rapidity in the decades since the book’s publication, and Ong could have no idea at the time of his writing just how swiftly the period of “secondary orality” would develop.
Those technological developments unforeseen by Ong also raise important questions about some of the key claims made in the book. Ong tends to describe advancements in literary technology as progress, linking these advancements to the benefits that he believes literacy enables, such as the greater possibility for dense, abstract analytic thought (and with it, novel and advanced understandings of the world, such as those that characterize the various fields of the social sciences). However, technological advancements after the publication of Ong’s text call this idea into question. There is growing evidence, for example, that the increased use of new technologies is linked to significant decreases in literacy, reading comprehension skills, and critical thinking skills (Sarah D. Sparks, “Screen Time Up as Reading Scores Drop. Is There a Link?” Education Week, November 8, 2019). Hence, although these advancements have revolutionized the accessibility of the written word in a way that is on par with the invention of the printing press (considering, for instance, the availability of unprecedented amounts of information online that hitherto was only available in print sources), it is not clear that this has produced the benefits and advances in literacy and critical thought that Ong claims follows from such technological innovations. This may suggest that Ong has incorrectly linked the mere increase in the accessibility of the written word to these benefits. Instead, it may be the case that it is only specific technological advances that yield these results and, further, that increases in literacy and other analytic skills are not simply a matter of the degree of the written word’s accessibility.
