Customer Reviews

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New Accents)

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"Orality and Literacy" is a scholarly work, which is the author's intent. Because of this, it requires a college level reading ability. With those warnings in mind, it is also a fascinating book on a somewhat remote subject: the way that our ability to write has changed our ways of thinking about ourselves and the world, our ways of remembering, and the progress of human development. It is a good introduction to this academic area as the author surveys the existing research and catalogs his sources very thoroughly. He gives particular attention to how oral cultures deal with thinking, remembering, and relating to the community in fundamentally different ways than literate cultures do. As a teacher, I found myself wondering if we could learn from oral cultures some of the old ways of relating to and remembering what we hear. Our literacy has allowed us to abandon these narrative and remembering techniques- to our impoverishment, I suspect.

I recently became interested in media in their own right. I tried reading McLuhan, but found him to be dazzling and frustrating - he would drop these little sound bites and then move on. I wanted a more in depth exploration of media.

McLuhan brought to my attention how media are not just passive carriers of content, but powerfully shape and influence it. Even more startling, he stated that media shape consciousness itself - they change the very people who use it. The tail wags the dog.

McLuhan's probes have their strength in galvanizing thought, not in the patient, careful arguing of a point. It's in this context I found Ong exactly what I was hoping/looking for. He tries to evoke an understanding of what is what like to live in a culture that had never known writing. He discusses how this affects each aspect of life, how it structures personality and identity, community, etc. (Not surprisingly, Ong was a student of McLuhan.)Then he discusses the shift to literacy, and how it affected identity as well.

I am used to academics writing in such a dense, convoluted style. Happily, this was completely absent from Ong's style. He manages to drop little insights about without belaboring them.

The great thing about a book like this for me - a layman - is that he manages to comment on apparently trivial, mundane features of daily life like calendars, lists, clocks, title pages in books - and show how they really manifest these huge, typically invisible trends in the changing of how we think about life and ourselves.

I loved this book - I will certainly read his earlier articles, since Orality and Literacy is mostly a summing of all prior research (as of 1982).

I just finished it - but the weaknesses I felt were that toward the end, as he tries to discuss print (not just writing) specifically, it becomes a bit harder to follow, since much erudition is presumed at this point. It seemed less thought out, less imaginative here than the start and middle of the book. He himself states his treatment of print will be comparatively cursory, though.

I also wanted more concrete anthropological examples, since ultimately all discussion needs to be grounded in actual case studies of how oral cultures were affected by literacy. But this was not quite the slant Ong book. It isn't supposed to be social science, although it does incorporate some field research. (He's whetted my appetite for it - this is where I will turn next.)

Media studies like Ong, Havelock, McLuhan help to provide a fresh take on what so much literary criticism and philosphical postmodernism obscures and confuses over - the idea of the 'self.' A great book.

Ong doesn't pretend to have the last word on this topic. But it is a thought provoking, straightforward discussion of ideas that tend to be very abstract, remote, and certainly not mainstream. It added insight into an area I thought I knew very well.

This book is extremely helpful in analyzing a field of study that rarely sees the light of day. Perhaps one reason for this is the complexity of the subject matter. However, the author is adroit in presenting all aspects of the topic so that we are able to at understand more clearly what is intrinsic to the topic. I would recommend this book to both the scholar and the beginner alike, but it requires patience and rereading to make headway in what is a fascinating subject.

Imagine a world that does not use print. You cannot. We simply use typography and chirography so much, it makes such a task pretty tough. However, Ong does an excellent job of making that task easier. In "Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word", Ong covers fundamental differences between oral and literate cultures, comparing and contrasting both to explain how previous stages of literacy, or non-literacy, have gotten us to our current mode of thought. Although this book was written in 1982, it still has heavy cultural relevance; maybe even more-so with the development of technology.

Finding his point is sometimes difficult. Ong's writing is highly academic, and it can be tough to understand what he is actually trying to say at times. Sentences can go on for paragraphs, and overuses of 'that' and other pro-nouns are abundant, and can thoroughly confuse the reader. Besides for the writing style, when you actually grasp a concept, the contextual information provided surly reinforces the idea.

Ong's main objective is to prove there is a difference in the way literate and non-literate people process and remember information, mainly in their environment. He does this with very strong logical arguments and well-studied information. One of the most interesting idea this book presents, is the idea of literacy turning people inward on themselves.

Even though this book was initially released before the massive expansion of the internet, this topic is almost more relevant now than it was at that time. Nearly everyone today has some sort of electronic media using 'print'(facebook, myspace) that makes any information you receive completely internalized. Ong backs this by writing about how sound is internalized as something coming from the real 'human' world. Words really exist as ink on paper in the real world, but without the meaning projected on them by us, they are essentially non-existent. However, an utterance will still be an utterance whether you understand it or not, that is to say you are still effected by it when you hear it.

Ong also refers to the epics of Homer, and the effect they had. This where the some of the most interesting content of the book lies. He says oral people did not have a way to remember, verbatim, things such as an epic so formulas and epitaphs were developed in order to come close to the original. Once writing was invented, these formulas were no longer needed, because writing serves as a function of memory, replacing older methods.

Although this book can seem repetitive, and at times is, "Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word" is definitely something every literate should read to get a better grasp on what is really behind the word.

I recently became interested in media in their own right. I tried reading McLuhan, but found him to be dazzling and frustrating - he would drop these little sound bites and then move on. I wanted a more in depth exploration of media.

McLuhan brought to my attention how media are not just passive carriers of content, but powerfully shape and influence it. Even more startling, he stated that media shape consciousness itself - they change the very people who use it. The tail wags the dog.

McLuhan's probes have their strength in galvanizing thought, not in the patient, careful arguing of a point. It's in this context I found Ong exactly what I was hoping/looking for. He tries to evoke an understanding of what is what like to live in a culture that had never known writing. He discusses how this affects each aspect of life, how it structures personality and identity, community, etc. (Not surprisingly, Ong was a student of McLuhan.)Then he discusses the shift to literacy, and how it affected identity as well.

I am used to academics writing in such a dense, convoluted style. Happily, this was completely absent from Ong's style. He manages to drop little insights about without belaboring them.

The great thing about a book like this for me - a layman - is that he manages to comment on apparently trivial, mundane features of daily life like calendars, lists, clocks, title pages in books - and show how they really manifest these huge, typically invisible trends in the changing of how we think about life and ourselves.

I loved this book - I will certainly read his earlier articles, since Orality and Literacy is mostly a summing of all prior research (as of 1982).

I just finished it - but the weaknesses I felt were that toward the end, as he tries to discuss print (not just writing) specifically, it becomes a bit harder to follow, since much erudition is presumed at this point. It seemed less thought out, less imaginative here than the start and middle of the book. He himself states his treatment of print will be comparatively cursory, though.

I also wanted more concrete anthropological examples, since ultimately all discussion needs to be grounded in actual case studies of how oral cultures were affected by literacy. But this was not quite the slant Ong took. It isn't supposed to be social science, although it does incorporate some field research. (He's whetted my appetite for it - this is where I will turn next.)

Ong doesn't pretend to have the last word on this topic. But it is a thought provoking, straightforward discussion of ideas that tend to be very abstract, remote, and certainly not mainstream.

Media studies like Ong, Havelock, McLuhan help to provide a fresh take on what so much literary criticism and philosphical postmodernism obscures and confuses over - the idea of the 'self.' It gave me a whole new vocabulary and set of questions to pursue in a topic that I had grown exhausted with, being worn out by postmodernism and literary criticism's approach to the same issues. A great book.

"Orality and Literacy" explains & compares two dominant culture forms in the world today. As a reader or literate I never considered the differences inherent in a primarily oral world. This book explains them. What a wonderful new way to see things.

Great, clearly written. This is a classic! Wonderful quotes: "More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness."

"Sparsely linear or analytic thought and speech is an artificial creation, structured by the technology of writing."

"Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance."

A guide to the transition between orality and literacy, the book deepens our understanding of our literary culture.

Readers interested in the ways technologies affect our thought processes should read this book.

Few books change your understanding of the world and the way communication works. This one does!

According to Ong, who wrote this book in 1981 (pre-WWW), writing is a form of technology that, through the act itself, changes the brain. By change, I mean that it compels one to think of the world in a whole different way. He doesn't so much as say that oral culture is inferior to literal culture, as he does take care to point out how humans are natural to both. It's actually interesting stuff.

I had to read this book for class. Otherwise, it's not light read, so unless you're just a tech-freak, leave the book on the shelf.