Orality and Literacy Book Review

Author: David Perell URL: https://www.perell.com/blog/orality-and-literacy One-line: A review of Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy — how the medium of communication (voice, writing, print, internet) reshapes how humans think, behave, and remember.

Key claims

• The medium shapes thought. As Ong observes, whether we communicate through voice, writing, or print “changes how we think and behave.” Writing is “the most momentous of all human technological inventions” — not an appendage to speech but a transformation of speech and thought.
• Writing is recent. Literacy is only ~6,000 years old; Homo sapiens has existed ~50,000 years. The first true writing came from the Sumerians around 3500 BC.
• Oral cultures depend on memory — “knowledge that wasn’t repeated, disappeared” — so they used repetition to preserve the past, breeding a conservative, traditionalist mindset that inhibits experimentation.
• Writing externalizes memory. Once written, an idea exists forever and need not be repeated, letting people learn faster, share information, and grapple with more advanced ideas. Writing created history, logic, and the foundation of mathematics — and so of software and computers.
• Writing transforms consciousness. Its slowness and the isolation of the writer encourage introspection and “growth of consciousness out of the unconscious.” Print made the Renaissance permanent, implemented the Reformation, and diffused knowledge as never before.
• The internet spreads externalized thought across the globe — a “collective externalized mind,” and rich media restores some of the nuance and emotion that plain text loses. “To kids, digital orality is not a second language — it’s second nature.”

Notable quotes

“Writing, in this ordinary sense, was and is the most momentous of all human technological inventions. It is not a mere appendage to speech. Because it moves speech from the oral–aural to a new sensory world, that of vision, it transforms speech and thought as well.” — Walter Ong

“More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.” — Walter Ong

“I seldom ever heard Brother Joseph or the Twelve preach or teach any principle but what I felt as uneasy as a fish out of water until I had written it. Then I felt right.” — Wilford Woodruff

“Speech, the universal way by which humans communicate and transmit experience, fades instantly… Writing, the first technology to make the spoken word permanent, changed the human condition.” — Denise Schmandt-Besserat

How it connects

• Orality and Literacy — the book under review (anti-library entry; the medium-shapes-mind thesis).
• Walter Ong — the author, source of the central argument.
• Writing — the recurring Perell theme; writing as a technology of thought.
• Wilford Woodruff — quoted on the compulsion to write down what was spoken; the same quote recurs in Kyle’s gospel-study notes.
• Hyper Publishing- The Wiki Strategy — extends the lineage from writing to hyperlinks and the internet.

Verbatim source notes — restored from Roam, 2026-09-21

• Print made the Italian Renaissance a permanent European Renaissance, how it implemented the Protestant Reformation and reoriented Catholic religious practice, how it affected the development of modern capitalism, implemented western European exploration of the globe, changed family life and politics, diffused knowledge as never before, made universal literacy a serious objective, made possible the rise of modern sciences, and otherwise altered social and intellectual life.”
• Through writing, humans escaped from the chains of memory, the significance of which is impossible to overestimate. Literacy is only about 6,000 years old, making it a relatively new phenomenon.
• Once it’s written down, an idea can exist forever. No longer does it need to be repeated. As a result, writing allows people to learn faster, share information, and grapple with more advanced ideas.
• “Literacy, as will be seen, is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself.”
• Oral cultures are dependent on their memories. Knowledge that wasn’t repeated, disappeared. Since memory is fragile, repeating a message reinforced it. It follows that oral cultures used repetition to preserve their knowledge and remember their past.
• “Writing, in the strict sense of the word, the technology which has shaped and powered the intellectual activity of modern man, was a very late development in human history. Homo sapiens has been on earth perhaps some 50,000 years. The first script, or true writing, that we know, was developed among the Sumerians in Mesopotamia only around the year 3500 BC. Human beings had been drawing pictures for countless millennia before this.”
• Writing and reading are solitary activities. As opposed to oral communication, the written word encourages introspection and illustrates the innner states of soul. Writing raises consciousness.
• “In the total absence of any writing, there is nothing outside the thinker, no text, to enable him or her to produce the same line of thought again or even to verify whether he or she has done so or not.”
• If writing allows humans to externalize their thoughts, the internet allows them to spread them across the globe:
• Strict plots and long narratives only arose with the development of writing. Even facts are a byproduct of the written word. In contrast, oral cultures memorized pithy parables and proverbs
• “Speech, the universal way by which humans communicate and transmit experience, fades instantly: before a word is fully pronounced it has already vanished forever. Writing, the first technology to make the spoken word permanent, changed the human condition
• Writing created history and logic, the foundation of mathematics. Since software is driven by logic — 0s and 1s — the computer you’re reading this on is a child of the written word
• When it comes to communicating nuance or emotion, the human face is a miraculous instrument. Compared with simple text messages, rich media inventions allow people to communicate in a deeper, more efficient matter; to say more with less. With the internet, visual conversations are no longer constrained by the limits of time and space.
• As Walter Ong observes in Orality and Literacy, the way we communicate — whether it be through voice, writing, or print — changes how we think and behave.
• “The very reflectiveness of writing – enforced by the slowness of the writing process as compared to oral delivery as well as by the isolation of the writer as compared to the oral performer – encourages growth of consciousness out of the unconscious… Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.”
• “The “collective externalized mind, the mind we all share, the infinite oscillation of our collective consciousness interacting with itself, adding a fuller, richer dimension to what it means to be human
• “The need to remember things establishes a highly traditionalist or conservative set of mind that with good reason inhibits intellectual experimentation. Knowledge is hard to come by and precious, and society regards highly those wise old men and women who specialize in conserving it, who know and can tell the stories of the days of old. By storing knowledge outside the mind, writing and, even more, print downgrade the figures of the wise old man and the wise old woman, repeaters of the past, in favor of younger discoverers of something new.”
• ((pf3v76i4l)) Wilford Woodruff
• Writing, though, is permanent and final. Once published, the words cannot be changed. It’s definitive and final. The reader is absent when the writer writes and the writer is absent when the reader reads
• Writing transformed the relationship between humans in communication. In oral communication, speaker and listener are always present to one another. It has a give-and-take nature. As speakers, take note of subtle feedback from listeners and use this feedback to inform dialogue. The oral song was shaped by interactions between singers and their audiences — same space; same time.
• Unlike oral speech, the written word can be revised and reconsidered. If I write a sentence and I don’t like it, I can always change it. Not so with words. Once a word leaves your mouth, it’s impossible to take it back. As Denise Schmandt-Besserat once wrote: