Ong I

     Literacy is the future, and we can't return to orality. That sentence may just sum up the first chapter of Walter Ong's book Orality and Litercy, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. He goes into detail about how literate and oral people think differently and what the limitations of literacy and orality are.

     To start Ong tells us that everything starts with an oral tradition. With that said he goes on to inform us of the limitations or orality in terms of vocabulary and representation of ideas. He also tells us that the vast minority of languages in the world have been turned into a written language or text. This is because it changes the way a culture or group of speakers needs to think in order to process an idea. While a literate person focuses on the text and how letters construct words and may see the letters in their mind, an oral person focuses on the sound that the word makes as there is no textual representation of the idea in that language.

     Ong goes on to talk about how extremely limited an oral tradition is in comparison to a literate one. The biggest advantage of literacy, is that we are able to write down everything we know and can preserve it to reflect on later. Oral tradition's lack this ability due to in inherit lack of text that comes along with having an oral tradition. People are only able to preserve what they know, there isn't a single repository of all of their information like what the Library of Congress is to us. Almost all of the information we could imagine or need is recorded somewhere in a text for us, but that isn't that case for an oral person. Imagine having to find someone who had to tell you in person what you needed to know but there was no guarantee the information would even be there.

     This leads me to think about where the world would be without written language. I know its a stretch as written language has been around for a very long time, but where would we be today? The world would almost undoubtedly be different, it would have to be. When I've read about oral culture in the past it almost always seems that time has stopped for them in terms of advancement (mostly in technology). The rate of technological breakthrough seems to be thousands of times slower, almost nonexistent, this in and of itself would trough us back to at least the dark ages.

     If anyone decides to read this how dramatically do you think a reversion to orality would change our world?