e shift in thinking that takes place in children as they move from orality to literacy. To classify this shift as positive or negative, however, is to impose a value judgment and to rank different modes of thought, though it is not clear what objective criteria could be used to do this. As noted by Ong, there is a shift from sound to sight in the way human beings perceive and assimilate information. The shift from orality to literacy also meant a shift from unity with nature to separation from nature. Literacy has a social context just as do other technologies which are shifting our mode of thought today, such as television or the computer.
Mass literacy has made possible the preservation and dissemination of massive amounts of information and material, and dissemination is indeed one of the means of preservation--the more copies there are of a given work, the more likely it will survive. There is no doubt that mass literacy has changed human interaction on a personal level and on the macro-level, alerting the
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