Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

For my first blog post, I decided to king of skip around the first half of the book and bring up parts that were particularly interesting to me. So reading the first half I found bits and pieces of each chapter that I wanted to look into.

“The new awakening in recent years to the orality of speech was not without antecedents” (p. 28, Ong). In chapter two Ong discusses oral tradition and how beyond the Old Testament that oral tradition has long existed, then proceeds to the topic of Homer which I find particularly interesting. In other classes when I’ve discussed Homer there have been several ideas of what or who he actually was. Maybe he was a poor poet or a great or genius one as Ong suggests. What I never thought of was that maybe Homer was more of an occupation rather than a person. Because The Iliad and the Odyssey are epics that were not done overnight and neither was the bible which had several authors. The idea that Homer was more of an occupation does bring complication to the prefabricated parts. Transitioning from the history of orality to when words are written and reviewed and fully literate did not take much time.

 “Fully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what a primary oral culture is like, that is, a culture with no knowledge whatsoever of writing or even of the possibility of writing” (p42, Ong). The possibility of writing has allowed humans to have power over most things such as names and better form of communication. Since an oral culture has no texts everything was probably heavily memorized. This is interesting because even before the invention of cell phones teachers and older generations would say they had to memorize certain phone numbers to call and always remember to dial. I currently only have three phone numbers memorized from my phone because I no longer have the need to memorize certain things because the phone does everything for me. This portion of the reading stood out to me because it just makes me realize how much of the newer generations are familiar with digital communication and less familiar with oral communication.

 I’ve had the conversation about communication in digital space in many different classes. We’ve talked about bias, race, sex, and just overall how people communicate in digital spaces. People do act differently according to which digital medium they are using. It’s just something interesting that everyone should consider!