A Better Pencil (Part 1)

On page 66, Dennis Baron states (quite nonchalantly) that "penmanship is about to become a forgotten skill." He states this as though it's common knowledge that our society is going to completely forget how to use a pen or pencil.

While I definitely think Baron makes some valid arguments here regarding how computers and laptops have changed writing, the pessimistic reactionary attitude that "kids these days just don't care about writing!!" is really childish. For all the good things that Baron discusses in regards to computers and writing, his opinions are invalidated when he claims that writing is dying because computers are so easy to use.

Earlier in the book he even discusses how people in the past may have mocked pencil users because the inkwell and quill was seen as more sophisticated and concise compared to a pencil. And just a few pages later he says "but handwriting itself is far from dead." So why does he say so frankly that "penmanship is about to become a forgotten skill"? It's a strange statement to make and and when he contradicts himself it's hard to take it seriously. I'm curious to see more elaboration in the second half of the book.

Things Fall Apart (Part II)

In Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy, he talks about oral societies and how (compared to literate societies) prefer "loads of epithets" that reinforce stereotypes and expectations about their culture. Phrases like "the manly warrior" or "a sturdy wall" or "the nurturing mother" populate the language. He also states that these descriptors are "cumbersome and tiresomely redundant because of their aggregative weight."

I think it's interesting to think about this idea of epithets and stereotypes between the society in Things Fall Apart and our own society in the U.S. Okonkwo struggles with his son's supposedly effeminate personality because his society expects men to be strong and masculine. An oral society like Okonkwo's would fail to accept someone like Nwoye because of his atypical traits.

Compare that to a literate society like our own and you'll find it's not as extreme. Our culture still places expectations upon boys and girls to act a certain way, quite literally from birth. Boys are given a "masculine" color (blue) while girls get "feminine" colored clothes (pink). We still expect boys to enjoy sports and rough housing and girls to play with dolls and dress-up.

But what distinguishes the two is the reaction to someone breaking the norms. Okonkwo chokes Nwoye when he finds he's joined the Christian missionaries, and disowns him shortly thereafter. Things are (generally) not as extreme today. I think it would be interesting to talk further about how the stereotypes that are so casually evident in the language of oral societies contribute to the continuing reinforcement of those stereotypes compared to a literate society.

Orality and Literacy Part 1

From reading a brief history of Walter Ong via Wikipedia and other online sources, it's very clear he is well respected in his field and someone whose opinions and writings should be carefully studied. This really upsets me, because so far I've found the information contained in Orality and Literacy to be extremely dated and full of lots of common knowledge information. I guess this can mostly be due to the publication date (1982), but I understand how Ong's book can be useful as a starting off point for our classes discussions and as something to reference back to as we read more complex books and discover more modern ideas.

It's really unfortunate that the book is so old, because Ong was really on the cusp of a technological revolution. If Orality and Literacy had been written just a decade later I'd suspect at least 75% of the book would be discussing computers and new technology. Ong discusses how writing is a learned style of communication and what implications a written text has for how a population forms their ideas.

I'm really curious about how different this book would have been if Ong had been around long enough to write it today. I think the Internet has really changed orality and textual writing forever. Things like globalization and literacy would have never been paired together until the internet, but now we've got things like worldwide emotive symbols and languages like HTML and CSS which are essentially universal.

I think Ong would have been frustrated with how the internet has changed written literacy. In chapter one he expresses frustration at the phrase "oral literature" and how it demonstrates reveals our "inability to represent to our own minds a heritage of verbally organized materials except as some variant of writing, even when they have nothing to do with writing at all." I can imagine Ong shaking his fist at pre-teens and their texting language of "OMG HOW R U WAT R U DOIN 2DAY??"

But like I said, that's why I feel like this text is out of date. If you want to understand new trends and new literacy, you need to approach them with an open mind and think critically about them. I think Ong really lays the foundation for some deeper thought with Orality and Literacy, but in terms of being a useful tool for discussing modern technology and how it works with language, I think it's less than helpful.