Orality, Literacy, Digitality

Assuming momentarily that we will work within Walter Ong's diachronic model that plot's Western consciousness through the stages of primary orality to literacy (first chirographic, then print) to secondary orality, and that we will frame ways of managing knowledge and verbalizations in Ong's binary, orality/literacy, and that we will set aside, again momentarily, post-structuralisms and post-modernisms that work to problematize and move beyond his positions, can we, through Ong, accumulate questions concerning what he might call the "psychodynamics" of digitality--electronic literacy? Momentarily or otherwise?

Ong's begins by assuming that "human society first formed itself with the aid of oral speech, becoming literate very late in its history."

Ong writes:

Diachronic study of orality and literacy and of the various stages in the evolution from one to the other sets up a frame of reference in which it is possible to understand better not only pristine oral culture and subsequent writing culture, but also the print culture that bring writing to a new peak and the electronic culture which builds on both writing and print. In this diachronic framework, past and present, Homer and television, can illuminate one another. (2)

The electronic age, Ong adds, has "sensitized us to the earlier contrasts between writing and orality" (3), highlighting what he believes are inherent differences between oral and literate consciousness: the Hegelian weave here is that it takes literacy to discovery the "pristine" primordiality of orality. The roots of being--knowing, identity, consciousness, time, space--Ong plants in the sensorium. Oral cultures "hear" the word/world; literate cultures "see" the word/world. It is this difference between hearing and seeing that determines our relationship to the words and worlds that hearing and seeing construct.

Ong foundationalizes the hearing/seeing distinction throughout his book. For example:

In a primary oral culture where no one has ever 'looked up' anything is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning. Without writing, words have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. You might "call" them back--"recall" them. But there is nowhere to "look" for them. They have no focus and no trace (a visual metaphor, showing dependency on writing), not even a trajectory. They are occurrences, events. (31)

Literacy, constructing a visual-dominant economy of verbal expression, alters this core relationship between us and language--an ontological, epistemological alteration, an alteration of our subjectivity, an alteration of word and world.

Though words are grounded in oral speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever. A literate person, asked to think of the word "nevertheless," will normally (and I strongly suspect always) have some image, at least vague, of the spelled-out word and be quite unable ever to think of the word "nevertheless" for, let us say, 60 seconds, without adverting to any lettering but only to the sound. This is to say, a literate person cannot fully recover a sense of what the word is to purely oral people. (12)

And this difference, Ong believes, has made all the difference.

To "hear" the word/world is to "know what you can recall" (33). Hence, any and all sustained thought is necessarily tied to memory. Formulas construct worlds. "Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them" (35). To "hear" the word/world is to reside inside paratactic structures rather than the hypotaxis of literacy (37). Sound constructs aggregations, lending to knowing an epithetical quality of thinking/knowing/saying "which high literacy rejects as cumbersome and tirelessly redundant because of its aggregative weight" (38). The heard/sounded world, evanescent, knows itself in the redundancy of the copiously sounded expression rather than the "sparse linearity" of the durable written line (40). This need to say repeatedly what is known constructs a "highly traditionalist or conservative set of mind that with good reason inhibits intellectual experimentation" (41). Knowing, therefore, operates close to lived experience; the known is always already tied to the knower (42). The tone of the oral world "sounds" agonistic to the literate; "orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle" (44). The structure of orality dualistically constructs the world into a highly "polarized, agonistic, oral world of good and evil, virtue and vice, villains and heroes" (45). Oral subjects, living in a close, "empathetic, communal identification with the known" (45), homeostatically slough off "memories which no longer have present relevance" (46). The sounded/heard world is "minimally abstract"; it is essentially "situational" (49).

As Ong moves us into the time and space of literacy, his well-known argument goes something like this: the technology of writing exteriorizes, decenters the interior unity of oral subjectivity. Subjects and objects come into focus in a higher consciousness of transformed, intense introspection--a new interiority. In particular the phonetic alphabet provides the soil for the germination of abstract, analytical thought. The communal, oral subject tied to the life world of sound reappears as the solipsistically literate subject--a Cartesian ego--tied to and formed by the visual technology of the written word. In a sense, literacy makes us over into the autonomous "I ams" that "write" therefore are--are in ways transformed by the "technologizing of the word."

Wandering along the Ong's path toward digitality, what, then, can we begin to ask about subjectivities transformed by electronic literacies? Ong calls the electronic age an age of "'secondary orality', the orality of telephones, radio, and television, which depends on writing and print for its existence" (3). Could we add the secondary orality of hypermedia? Or are we somewhere different in cyberspace? And what about the waning dependency on print? As we move from print to pixel? At the end of his discussion, Ong points to what he calls the "inward turn."

The evolution of consciousness through human history is marked by the growth in articulate attention to the interior of the individual person as distanced--though not necessarily separated--from the communal structures in which each person is necessarily enveloped. Self-consciousness is coextensive with humanity: everyone who can say "I" has an acute sense of self. But reflectiveness and articulateness about the self takes time to grow.


The highly interiorized stages of consciousness in which the individual is not so immersed unconsciously in communal structures are stages which, it appears, consciousness would never reach without writing. The interaction between the orality that all human beings are born into and the technology of writing, which no one is born into, touches the depths of the psyche. (178)

If "the way in which a person feels himself or herself in the cosmos has evolved in a patterned fashion over the ages," how do/will we feel ourselves in a cosmos at least partially constructed digitality in hypertext and hypermedia? Can we project a hypothesis with Ong's orality/literacy binary as our initial touchstone? If we do, is digitality a third term or more a function of the secondarily oral or the literate? Or entirely different? Recall that Ong's entire argument hinges on the supposition that "technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word" (82).

Some Psychodynamics of Knowing/Thinking

Temporarily, I have left the table above incomplete. I hope you will help me complete it. If you have a suggestion about how I should fill in the third column, please use the comments form.

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