Jack Ong
Orality
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, searchOrality is thought and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy (especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population. The study of orality is closely allied to the study of oral tradition. However, it has broader implications, implicitly touching every aspect of the economics, politics, institutional development, and human development of oral societies. The study of orality has important implications for international development, especially as it relates to the goal of eradicating poverty, as well as to the process of globalization.
Walter J. Ong, a key scholar in this field, distinguishes between two forms of orality: ‘primary orality’ and ‘residual orality’.
Impact of literacy on culture
Ong draws on pioneering work by Milman Parry and Marshall McLuhan, among the first to fully appreciate the significance of the word as a technology. McLuhan, in his work The Gutenberg Galaxy shows how each stage in the development of this technology throughout the history of communication – from the invention of speech (primary orality), to pictograms, to the phonetic alphabet, to typography, to the electronic communications of today – restructures human consciousness, profoundly changing not only the frontiers of human possibility, but even the frontiers it is possible for humans to imagine.
Primary orality
‘Primary orality’ refers to thought and its verbal expression within cultures “totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print.”
All sound is inherently powerful. If a hunter kills a lion he can see it, touch it, feel it and smell it. But if he hears a lion he must act, fast. Speech is a form of sound that shares this common power. Like other sounds, it comes from within a living organism. A text can be ignored; it is just writing on paper. But to ignore speech can be unwise; our basic instincts compel us to pay attention.
Writing is powerful in a different way: it permits people to generate ideas, store them, and retrieve them as needed across time in a highly efficient and accurate way. The absence of this technology in oral societies limits the development of complex ideas and the institutions that depend on them. Instead, sustained thought in oral settings depends on interpersonal communication, and storing complex ideas over a long period of time requires packaging them in highly memorable ways, generally by using mnemonic tools.
In his studies of the Homeric Ques
