Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

Ong observes that orality is difficult to imagine for individuals raised in a literate society. Many features of oral culture stem from the nature of sound as transient and “evanescent.” Because auditory input cannot naturally be held, recorded, or stilled like other sensory information – for instance a visual object in motion can be stopped without dissipating, unlike a cry – sounds are viewed more as events than objects in oral cultures. Speech is an action rather than a representation of thought. Words are universally considered powerful and dynamic in oral cultures, often associated with magic. Without writing or reference materials, it is necessary to know how to refer to something in order to understand or control it, meaning that in oral cultures it is often held that knowing something’s name grants power over it. Words lose this association with magic in literate cultures because writing a word renders it inert, a dead label rather than a driven action.

In oral cultures, thought processes are limited by the necessity of recollection. If complex knowledge is not remembered then it can never be recalled or verified and is worthless. Communication with an interlocutor is a necessary component of memory in oral cultures, but even that does not suffice to preserve knowledge unless that knowledge is itself memorable.