Orality and Literacy

"If a picture is worth a thousand words, why is it a saying?" writes Walter Ong in his book "Orality and Literacy." I found Ong's book and his analysis of oral culture and the differences between orality and writing and the changes brought about in thought and expression with writing to be the opposite of what I would have thought. Having grown up in a more reading and writing centric culture, it was interesting to read about orality and the fact that writing chiefly depends upon orality: "oral expression can exist and mostly has existed without any writing at all, writing never without orality."

While reading about the historical aspects of orality and writing was educational, I was most interested in chapter five, “Print, Space and Closure.” As I said in my other post responding to the film “Helvetica,” I have truly never thought about the texts that are all around me or the impact spacing and written word has upon consciousness.

The thought that we often think that all text involves sight and sound and we think that reading is a visual activity that makes us think of sounds, it’s weird to think of it the way that early printers thought of it; that reading is a listening process that begins with sight.

I never paid attention to the way I see the things I read in my head, for example how Ong said that when you say “nevertheless” to somebody, they usually can’t go a minute without thinking of the letters involved in the word.

Chapter five of the book reiterated a lot of the things we’ve been talking about in class about how the position of text on a page and even the white space contribute to the overall meaning of it.

I checked out George Herbert’s poem, The Altar…

The Altar
A broken ALTAR, Lord thy servant rears,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch'd the same
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow'r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.


This reminds me of creative writing class in high school where we used to look at poems by people like e.e. cummings who took advantage of spacing (http://www-scf.usc.edu/~thier/ee/#found).

This is why for last class’ project I chose to focus on spacing more than changing fonts up, it’s so much harder to use spacing to convey meaning and it’s cool that poems or works of writing are often more than just the words, it’s everything involved in the printing like Ong talks about in Chapter five.

And oh, the technology we have today! Trying to understand what it was like for people back in the days of the Lincoln-Douglas debates is almost impossible for somebody who has grown up in such a technologically advanced time.