360 VIEW

‘Orality and literacy: The technologising of the world’

5 March, 2008

This article is in response to a very interesting argument about the nature and history of literacy and orality by Walter J. Ong. This article can be found at www.cs.indiana.edu/~port/teach/relg/ong.html. Go there now so that you can see what i’m goin’ on about in this blog.

A word that springs to mind reguarding the state of the world before language…lacking.

Where would we be without orality and literacy?

These are the bare foundations of society. Certainly we would be left in the dark, unaware of human potential.

I love the point Ong makes about orality as natural, and literacy as artificial. As i type this sentence right now, i feel an internal struggle between my rational and emotional brain to refrain from going back and making my i’s capitols. I also feel the need to think about tone and spelling while righting… its really distracting. But then why am i writing this?

Ong rightfully points out, we use literacy in order to allow human natures artificial desires to be fulfilled. I write this blog to reach a wider audience than ummmm… lets say the people in my house who are hardly interested in my philosophical rants on Walter J. Ong.

Ong talks about the Greeks who began the Phonetic alphabet. Kerckhove (1981) suggested this favoured left hemisphere activity and therefore allowed for abstract and analytic thought. Which, was very true in the case of Aristotle who was known for writing hierarchical lists used to present his philosophical ideas. Like, his theory on the embodied souls of the world having three levels of virtue:

Rational (Human) – moral virtues

Appetitive (Fauna)- appetitive virtue

Irrational (Flora)- vegetative nutritional virtue

Notice I am able to present this hierarchical structure so conveniently on this blog.

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: , Aristotle, Greeks, Hebrew, Kerckhove, Ladino, Literacy, Orality, Phonetic, Spanish, Walter J. Ong.