Second Response to Orality and Literacy

When first reading the selection for today, I was a little confused by the points that were being laid out in front of me. For example, “Print suggests that words are things far more than writing ever did.” I still am not entirely sure on how to interpret that quote. I look at writing and print similar things. Print is just a little more technologically advanced than the actual form of manually writing.

I guess the best way for me to interpret this quote from Ong is to assume some things. He talks about how the printing press has each individual letter before a word is formed on a page. Whereas, in writing, letters are simply figments of our imagination before the ink touches the page to begin to form them. The printing press made letters and words tangible objects before they even made a mark on the paper. I suppose this is the beginning of the transition between oral culture and sight culture/written culture. Actually, Ong would probably disagree that sight and written culture go together. It should probably be printed culture. This is Ong’s whole point that writing did not lead to a sight oriented culture, but printing did.

I thought it was amazing how accountants used to listen to numbers and figures and be able to do taxes based on that. I cannot imagine being able to just hear numbers and be able to figure out whatever it is they figure out. I know that I am a visual person, so I would never be able to do that. I cannot even spell words orally, I have to write them down to make sure it looks right.

That brings me to another topic that comes to mind when I read over this. Since people were very orally drawn, does that mean that “visual people” did not exist before print became such a common practice? Did these “visual people” have to sit and deal with hearing things orally without the use of print? Maybe they were considered the learning disabled because they could not function without something visually stimulating. I know there was not such a thing as a “learning disability” long, long ago, but perhaps these people were considered dumb and were not able to truly show their intelligence because the world they were living in did not function in a way that they were best able to. Now that I think about it more, people were probably just used to functioning orally and writing things down for record purposes only that it did not even cross their mind to do such things differently.

I suppose writing and printing has really changed a lot of things that are so transparent to us. For example, the idea of the a-typical plot did not even exist in oral culture. Ong states that the plot diagram that we have been taught since elementary school was obsolete in oral culture. He says that the plot was more like a knot being tied and then untying that knot. In stories that were expressed orally, people would tell of the problem that occurred in the story and then later explain how that problem came to be, rather than laying out all of the details as the plot progresses. This supposedly helped with being able to memorize the stories or poems being retold. I guess it is easier to remember the main points and fill in the details later.