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But like I said, that's why I feel like this text is out of date.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.