The European Reformation was where print-based Ramism reformed knowledge as well as religion a move that linked religion with the rise of capitalism and created a path dependency for methodism and scientific method alike
Ong’s expertise lay in using the skills of literacy-historical research and textual criticism to tease out the way that the pre-modern arts of knowledge - logic, rhetoric, and dialectics - were transformed following the emergence of print
Sign languages are substitute for speech and dependent on oral speech systems
Of the 3000 languages spoken that exist today only 78 have a literature
You cannot without serious and distinct and disabling distortion describe a primary phenomenon by starting with the subsequent secondary phenomenon and pairing away the differences
For over two millennia literates have devoted themselves to the study of Homer with varying mixtures of insight, misinformation and prejudice, conscious and unconscious.
In an oral culture, knowledge, once acquired had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost: fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential for wisdom and effective adminstration.
Jaynes dates the Odyssey a hundred years later than the Iliad and believes that wily Odysseus marks a breakthrough into the modern self-conscious mind, no longer under the rule of the voices
There’s no way to stop sound and have sound. I can stop a moving picture camera and hold one frame fixed in screen. If I stop the movement of sound, I have nothing - only silence, no sound at all.
It is worth learning the tools of oral cultures because speeches and presentations take place in the land of oral cultures.
Learning to read and write disables the oral poet. It introduces into his mind the concept of a text as controlling the narrative and thereby interferes with the oral composing processes which have nothing to do with texts but are the remembrance of songs sung.
A texturally supported religious tradition can continue to authenticate the primacy of the oral in many ways. In Christianity, for example, the Bible is read aloud at liturgical services. For God is thought of always as speaking to human beings, not as writing to them.
Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it.
The phonetic Alphabet is much less beautiful than the symbolic one
The most remarkable achievement in the history of the alphabet was the creation of the Korea one
It took 3 years and perfectly accommodated Korean phonemics. It was an alphabetic script with something of the appearance of a text in Chinese characters.
Before writing was deeply interiorized by print, people did not feel themselves situated every moment of their lives in abstract computed time of any sort.
The personal diary is a very late literary form, in effect unknown until the 17th century
By separating the knower from the known, writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspective, opening the psyche as never before not only to the external objective world quite distinct from itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set.
Of the millions who spoke Latin for 1400 years, every one was also able to write it. There were no purely oral users.
Today when curricula list rhetoric as a subject it usually means simply the study of how to write effectively
The three Rs—reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic— representing an essentially nonrhetorical, bookish, commerical and domestic education, gradually took over from the traditionally orally grounded, heroic, agonistic education that has generally prepared young men in the past for teaching and professional, ecclesiastical, or political public service.
Print situated words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did.
A website is more like a manuscript than it is a book
Oral poets commonly plunged the reader in medias res not because of any grand design, but perforce. Having heard perhaps scores of singers singing hundreds of songs of variable lengths about the Trojan War, Homer had a huge repertoire of episodes to string together, but, without writing, absolutely no way to organize them in strict chronological order.
The writer’s audience is always a fiction. For a writer any real recipient is normally absent. The fictionalizing of readers is what makes writing so difficult.