Orality and Literacy

Why it’s on the list: Walter Ong, a historian and Jesuit priest, argues that writing is “the most momentous of all human technological inventions” and traces how the shift from oral to literate cultures transforms how people think, behave and remember. It is the deepest theoretical foundation for the media-shapes-mind claims that run through my reading on communication, politics and the internet.

Where I heard about it

• David Perell — reviewed it in Orality and Literacy Book Review.
• A media-theory reading cluster — referenced in one of my notes alongside The Gutenberg Galaxy and No Sense of Place.

Connections

• Walter Ong — the author; Ong’s central claim that writing transforms speech and thought (not merely records it) is the thesis Kyle has already absorbed via Orality and Literacy Book Review.
• Orality and Literacy Book Review — David Perell’s 2018 review is the entry point to the book’s key ideas in Kyle’s corpus: writing externalizes memory, made the Renaissance permanent, and set the foundation for mathematics and computing.
• Print Culture — Ong’s account of how print culture shapes linear, sequential, logical thought is the historical substrate of Postman’s argument in Amusing Ourselves To Death.
• Media Ecology — Ong is one of the foundational theorists in the media ecology tradition alongside McLuhan; the book’s argument that each communications medium reshapes consciousness is the tradition’s core claim.
• Writing — the central subject: Ong argues writing is a technology of thought, not just of communication.
• The Gutenberg Galaxy — McLuhan’s 1962 companion work on the print era; the two books are read together as the founding texts of media ecology.