Ong's theories of orality make the claim that since oral cultures have no fixed texts, they organize and transmit information in unique ways, and the basis or oral thought is memory (Ong 41-57). Orality relies on the oral/visual world. Ong believed that:
Words come into being through time, and exist only so long as they are going out of existence...[when I pronounce "reflect," by the time I get to the "flect" the "re" is gone, and necessarily and irretrievably gone (Presence 1987 30).
He believed that the rhythmic patterns, alliteration, and repetition help imprint the spoken word in memory, and it is thus the presentation of language which is important. In this way, categories of thought are internalized and become part of communal knowledge. In writing and reading, the author and reader become fictionalized because they cannot capture how people talk and interact in real life.
When a culture develops a written language, it changes the culture in question forever (Ong 15). Ong admits that the development of a written language is vital to the development of science, and also history, philosophy, an understanding of art and literature, but wrote:
The awareness is agony for persons rooted in primary
orality, who want literacy passionately but who also
know very well that moving into the exciting world of
literacy means leaving behind much that is exciting and
deeply loved in the earlier oral world. We have to die
Ong considered the orality of a culture that persists in a culture with a written language "secondary orality." He believed that written language only served to divide people from their experience of the external world and from themselves because it facilitates more abstract explorations of thought, and objectified spoken language, robbing it of its dynamic function. Ong does admit that, "various kinds of residual orality as well as the literate quality of the secondar
...