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

Rating:
Summary: fascinating, but a slow read.
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: Writing restructures consciousness
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: fascinating, but a slow read.
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: Writing restructures consciousness
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: One Interesting Concept, 179 Grueling Pages
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: One Interesting Concept, 179 Grueling Pages
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book - fascinating content with clear form
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book - fascinating content with clear form
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Orality and Illiteracy
Review: Read this book only if you are forced to do so by someone. Even that didn't do it for me. One of my main hang ups was that in early going Ong describes something as "thing-like". Is it possible for something to not be "thing-like"? I mean if it wasn't someTHING, then it wouldn't be anything and you couldn't talk about it. Then the rest of the thing is just boring. If you want an expensive fire starter or something to stop the teetering of some annoying table then buy this.