Term Paper on Orality and Literacy

Walter Ong (1982) in his book “Orality and Literacy” suggests that the nature of self and community change as a culture moves from pure orality to scribality to textuality. This change is a movement from exteriority to interiority and from communal structures to the self-reflective. Let us see how the community changed as different communication technologies were developed.

The shift from primary oral culture to a literate one in Greece led to change in language and thought. Ong have characterized the resulting change in the language and a culture as a shift from the active, participatory world of orality to the linear static world of print. Ong characterizes the changes in language and thought growing from the radio and television broadcast as a secondary orality.

Shift from Orality to Literacy
The word “text” (meaning “to weave”) is actually more compatible with oral utterance than with literature. Oral disclosure is often thought in terms of weaving or stitching. The Greek word rhapsoidein means, “To stitch songs together”. Borrowing, heavily from each other, poets in primary oral cultures recalled and repeated formulas of popular rhythmic patterns to rhapsodize songs. Formulaic thought patterns are essential for wisdom and effective administration in oral cultures. Oral rhyme schemes help commits ideas to memory.

Click Here To View Top 3 Term Paper Sites

Ong described technology of writing in his book, which transformed human consciousness. It is not only allowed for the representation of the words as signs, but it also gave a linear shape to thought and provided a critical framework within which to think analytically. He said that the beginning of Greek philosophy was tied in with the restructuring of thought brought about by writing. Plato’s exclusion of poets from his republic displays a rejection of the old, warm, mobile, personally interactive life world of oral culture.

From its very beginning, the technology of writing was associated with privileged elite. The earliest writing systems, Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics, were the property of priests. Ong says that writing is capable of interiorizing the self against whom the objective world is set; it is important to notice that the great introspective religious traditions, Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism, all are text based. The literate segment of the population, those who read and interprets assumed an occult power that elevated their status.

The shift from a primary oral culture to a literate one in ancient Greece came about because of the invention of the Greek vowels in the fourth century BCE. With the Greek alphabets, texts could be made which matched written speech. This encouraged writing and the standardization of the Greek alphabet led to widespread literacy, the beginning of a manuscript culture, and the permanent loss of primary orality in western cultures.

In the 15th century, Gutenberg invented the printing press and revolutionized possibilities for the dissemination of written text. The manuscript culture becomes a print culture. The invention of the printing press, while democratizing what was once exclusively the property of the priests furthered the writing’s distance from the sound world to the world of visual space.

Qualities of an oral culture
• Aggregative closely related to the idea of being additive, oral speech tends to work by building up levels of details to characterize things, rather than a concise statement about an object.
• Because oral discourse must rely on memory, it is often redundant and copious. In speech acts, the listener may be distracted for a moment.
• An oral culture tends to value those who can preserve what has been said, and value the wisdom of wise old sages. Therefore, an oral culture must expand great energy to preserve what has been said. In contrast, a literate culture, secure in the knowledge that the past can be preserved, tends to favor something new.
• In an oral culture, learning is by apprehension; there are no “how-to” manuals. In a literate culture, analytic categories can be used to structure knowledge.
• In oral societies, the speaker and the listener coexist within the same point in space and time. When a person makes some statement, the listener is bound to respond. This is unlike a literate culture, which separates the author from the reader, and removes speech from situations in which human interacts and struggle.

Conclusion
Ong’s proposes a transformation of consciousness that accompanies the move from orality to literacy to print. The move to print includes the technology of virtually identical reproduction of pages, as well as text and images. Modern science developed from such technology. According to Ong, an evolution in human consciousness has been under way as a continuation of words and print. According to him, when a medium like hypertext meets the modern reader and writer, they will know a more open ended and more interiorized experience of language and meaning. They will experience an intensified sequential processing of the word.