Walter Ong

Walter Ong’s 1977 speech to the National Humanities Institute on Writing as Technology discusses the stark differences between oral culture and written culture and builds on the connection between the two cultures, as written culture was adapted from oral culture.

Olivia Johnson builds on this speech and expands on his ideas using his own audio.

Transcription

Olivia Johnson

 Walter Ong’s 1977 speech to the National Humanities Institute on Writing as Technology discusses the stark differences between oral culture and written culture and builds on the connection between the two cultures as written culture was adapted from oral culture. The key identifier of oral culture is the absence of writing.

Walter Ong

Totally oral culture, where nobody can write and nobody has even thought of the possibility of writing. In a culture like this, remember, nobody has ever looked up anything. When anybody was born, when anybody died, what belongs to whom, when, when anything happened. In fact, they don’t have the idea of looking up.

Olivia Johnson

 Because oral culture is the absence of writing, an integral characteristic of oral culture is the use of sound. The communication of information in an oral culture is built on the ability to retain information to pass along. The ability to recall is what makes oral culture distinct from other cultures.

 Walter Ong

All they can do is recall. They can just say it again.

Olivia Johnson

 Despite the importance of recall in sustaining oral culture, oral culture is limited to the information provided by the community that practices it. If information is unknown or uncertain by the community, there is no way of being able to fact-check.

Walter Ong

 In that kind of culture, if you don’t know something, you ask somebody. If he doesn’t know, you maybe ask somebody else. When you run out of people to ask, that’s the end. Nobody knows. There’s no way to find out anymore.

Olivia Johnson

 Ong broke down the strengths of oral culture with the culture’s ability to recall information in order to pass along information to others. However, a weakness of oral culture is faced with the limitation of information as information is confined to what the community knows. Written culture is adapted from oral culture as written culture was pioneered by individuals in oral cultures.

Walter Ong

 First of all, the people who invented writing were the ones who talked most. Writing was invented by people in urban settings,

Olivia Johnson

 While written culture is adapted from oral culture, written culture differs from oral culture as the written word is a key factor in information retention and communication for those who participate in written cultures. Ong identifies a characteristic of written culture as the ability to conduct a treatise.

Walter Ong

 So when you get writing, something happens. Once you get writing, you can write a thing that we would call a treatise, something like Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric, which is a scientific approach to oratory.

Olivia Johnson

 Written culture is a culture meant to expand the capabilities of oral culture by applying the ability to recall information into the written word to be preserved. In addition to written culture’s expansion of oral culture, Ong claims that written culture differs from oral culture due to its ability to create a new mode of thinking in the human mind.

Written culture allows the individual to piece together information rather than just recall it.

Walter Ong

 this means that when this kind of treatise is composed, this is a completely new experience for the human mind No human mind had ever gone through that kind of motion where you show that this reas– ca– is due to this, and this is due to this, and this is due to these three factors, and each of those are due to these four others.

You can’t do that in an oral culture.

Olivia Johnson

 Despite the differences between oral culture and written culture, they are interlinked as written culture could not exist without oral culture. Written culture may be seen as more progressive due to its advances in comparison to oral culture. However, written culture reinforces the teachings of oral culture and reimagines those teachings in a new form.

Walter Ong

 the new medium, writing, has reinforced the old. It’s made talkers talk more, but it’s made them talk differently, and that’s what always happens when a new medium comes in. It never wipes out the old. It always reinforces it, but it changes it so that it no longer does what it used to do the same way.

So you have to knew the kn- to know the new medium, or you can’t use the old.