ongdoompost

notes from an insomniac

It’s been weird seeing Walter Ong everywhere all of a sudden. When I started digging into Marshall McLuhan and his intellectual progeny about five years ago, it was rather lonely. Nobody was into this stuff. It was passé. Irrelevant. And now Orality and Literacy has apparently become trendy.

While I was in Death Valley, Naomi Kanakia posted a gloss of Ong’s opus. I have some quibbles and objections to it, but I’ll keep them to myself. I’m not an evangelist or commissar, and I’m happy that she ultimately recommends it in spite of her own quibbles and objections.

What I want to call attention to (even signal boost) is a comment left by one Robert Minto.

The really empirically obvious difference between literate and illiterate societies is memory. Without writing, illiterate societies tended to develop other ways to retain information. (Lynne Kelly is the synthesist to read on this: basically there has been an explosion of cool new research on the amazing and intricate ways illiterate societies have preserved information. In terms of mnemonics, literacy was a downgrade.) The somewhat wishywashy stuff about abstract thought vs immediacy, etc that Ong speculates about is all downstream of this one hard difference: do you have to keep info in your head or can you write it down? Because of that--this is my idea now--literacy is a kind of one way street thanks to modern technology. We might be moving away from literacy, but we are not moving back toward a world where information is stored in personal memory. Imagine a kid who can't read at all but can somehow use tiktok and youtube. They do not live in a world where they have to store all the important info in their head. Video and audio recording are themselves ways of preserving info outside your head. I imagine your average tiktok dancing teen studies the dance of the hour with the same scholastic intensity as Aquinas studying Aristotle. So the kind of "orality" this hypothetical kid exhibits lacks the absolutely key feature of pre-literate orality (memorizing everything). This kids "orality" is a new kind of thing. And that's why (imo) the work of someone who studied the transition from orality to literacy is basically useless for us trying to understand this hypothetical transition from literacy to... post-literacy? or whatever fancy word we want to use for it.

So, full disclosure: I typed out some thoughts about this during a bout with insomnia earlier this week. At some point I realized there was no way I could post them as a reply to Mr. Minto’s comment on Ms. Kanakia’s post without coming across as a maniac, so I transferred it into notepad and kept typing because I couldn’t fucking sleep.

Sorry. I had a few rough few nights, is all. (The days between weren’t great, either.)

In spite of my better judgement, I’ll share this stuff anyway—or a very slightly tidied and greatly reduced version of it. Apologies to Mr. Minto; go read his recent post about Pilgrim’s Progress author John Bunyan.

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• Having taught undergraduate-level gen-ed English classes for the last two years, I am confident that the transition is not hypothetical. Engaging with written texts is a practically foreign activity to most of the students who come into my classroom. It’s just not something they ever do, or have ever really had to do. Many are as incapable of continuously following, absorbing, and forming thoughts about a ten-page essay as the average American born in the last fifty years is of memorizing the first book of the Iliad. The question isn’t whether it’s happening, but how fast it’s happening—and how long, and to what extent, can a form of secondary literacy be retained.

  • Will it matter if most of the United States Senate can’t read above a fourth-grade level? Will it matter if our CEOs and generals cannot?

    • Or: would it matter if literacy was a thing restricted to our elites—educated at device-free private schools, assigned personal tutors, etc., while common public education remained a screen-time category?

      • A fiend of mine who has taught math at a public middle school for several years once shared a story, which I will try to repeat accurately. Sometimes he takes classes to a computer lab down the hall. There are, of course, problems with students muting the speakers, opening a browser window, and navigating to YouTube instead of doing what they’re supposed to be doing. On one of the last days of the year, he got fed up with a repeat offender and made him sit behind a room divider and read, draw, do homework, whatever. The lesson finished early; my friend allowed his students to do whatever they wanted (in other words, watch YouTube) for the remainder of the period. The punished student was not permitted to return to his PC, and had to remain behind the divider. My friend caught him lying on his belly, trying to look out at the nearest computer screen through the space between the floor and the divider’s bottom edge.

  • Ours has probably been a culture of secondary literacy since the late twentieth century. Compare newspaper/magazine articles about fashion written in 1890 against ones written in 1990.

• I don’t believe that the “immediacy” or the sensuous character of our newly predominant media is wishy-washy or negligible. The anaesthetic, emotionally devoid character of the static text promotes detached and/or reserved judgement; no matter whether one reads Bleak House or Fifty Shades of Grey, or watches clips of I, Claudius or Duck Dynasty on YouTube, each medium ingrains different habits of thought, different modes of engagement.

• If we believe, for instance, that the subtly biased language in ostensibly “fair and balanced” right-wing TV journalism (remember the “death tax?”) can discursively frame one’s worldview, why should it be a stretch of the imagination to say that the technical dimensions or sensory characteristics of the principal medium a society uses to store, retrieve, and communicate information likewise lend a tinge to our cast of mind?

  • Observation: when teaching undergrad fiction workshops this spring, I noticed that a surprisingly large proportion of students had problems keeping their verb tenses consistent. (Some improved; some disregarded my notes.) I have not gone so far as to review every document I’ve been handed to confirm this, but I think I see an in instinct to write expository or descriptive passages in the past tense, and to click into the present during dialogue-heavy passages or fast-paced and dramatic moments. My pet theory is that students’ digital media habits (few came in with favorite authors or novels; most were eager to talk about their favorite video games or streaming series), have impressed upon them a sense that speech and action are only speech and action, properly speaking, when they are occurring now.

  • Consider: the experiences of watching a TED Talk versus reading a .txt transcript of one. Which will be more immediately persuasive—the mute, unenthused black letters against a white backdrop; or the handsome, well-groomed intellectual exuding confidence, making hand gestures, and modulating the tenor and emotion of their speech, all while a rapt audience audibly laughs at their jokes and showers them with applause for saying the Right Thing regarding a topical matter at a felicitous moment?

    • Consider: the experiences of watching a twenty-minute TED Talk versus listening to ten two-minute clips of ten separate TED Talks’ juicy parts. I don’t suppose viewers of the latter will feel themselves any less informed and knowledgeable about the matters under discussion than viewers of the former.

• But Minto is absolutely correct that on the level of social organization, the key thing is that neo-orality doesn’t retrieve the necessity on which the practices of the old orality stood. In a world with few means of externalizing memory, knowledge is not a thing, and must be repeatedly enacted through speech or deed. As Minto says, literacy atrophied the mnemonic capacity of every culture that adopted it.

• Literacy is principally a means of congealing speech in an object-permanent form and exteriorizing memory. Compensating for the atrophied mnemonic “muscle” is a strengthening and elaboration of other forms of mental exertion—detailed in Maryanne Wolf’s celebrated Proust and the Squid.

  • A nonliterate milieu could not have produced an Aristotle, Newton, Watt, or Freud—for better and for worse.

• More than Ong, McLuhan highlights the trade-offs that came with the West’s transition from orality to literacy, and from chirography to print. The loss of memory has already been touched upon. The protracted ungluing of communal relations was another consequence of the Gutenberg revolution, though it came about more indirectly than directly.

• Not long ago, I took a grad-level course in African religion(s). I came away from it more convinced than ever of an aphorism McLuhan puts forth in The Gutenberg Galaxy: “Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.” To all appearances, the traditional oral milieux of sub-Saharan Africa possessed (or perhaps still possess?) a fully integrated worldview with a singular universe of discourse. Over time, literacy promotes the partitioning of knowledge into separate disciplines, fragmenting a culture’s perception of its world even as it amplifies its effective power over it. Something is gained, but something else is irrevocably lost.

• It is crucial to distinguish the “primitive” orality of wholly nonliterate societies with the emergent neo-orality of the developed world.¹ The technical capabilities of digital media—their sensory richness, instantaneity, responsiveness, etc.—partially recreate certain salient characteristics of a primary oral social environment. But this neo-orality is an aspect of something else entirely.

  • McLuhan’s notes on environments and anti-environments are useful here. The late-twentieth media ecosystem dominated by television only became fully visible and circumscribable by our understanding around the time when modems began crackling and whining. We probably won’t fully understand the electronic media paradigm of the early twenty-first century until it has carried at least some of its tentacles out the door with itself. (Minerva’s owl flies at dusk, and all.)

• As a roadmap, Orality and Literacy is useless. Ong (and McLuhan for that matter) can provide avenues for fruitful conjecture, but neither can tell us what lies ahead. History is like the lines of a rhyming poem; reading it might permit us to make an educated or lucky guess about which words will terminate the next two or three lines, but no more than that. We’re speeding forward through the dark—as ever we have been. But the consequences of a catastrophic error will be unprecedently grave. Recent events in the Strait of Hormuz are an object lesson in how ripple effects work in a world sustained by interdependent complex systems.

• Question: what human capacity is unlocked or strengthened by a digital “literacy” that does not systematically train people in memory, attentiveness, or modes of prolix cognition? At what tasks is a person whose habits and biases of thought have been shaped by digital media equipped to excel? At what does a society of such people excel?

  • Over the past couple of years I found myself asking this question while grading student essays arguing a case on behalf of the educational potential, intellectual pleasures, and artistic merits of video games. There’s at least one every semester. None have warranted a grade higher than a C.

    • Several colleagues who have been in the game for much longer than me have frankly admitted that papers to which we award C’s today would have received D’s twenty years ago. “At least I can see they’re trying,” sums up the usual justification, uttered through a sigh. “At least I know they’re not using ChatGPT.”

  • My wife recently took an accounting course, and reported that some oldheads in the field are getting jittery. What they’re seeing, she says, is that a lot of younger people in accounting understand how to enter numbers into a spreadsheet to arrive at the correct values, but are ignorant of how the mathematics actually work. Should we be concerned? Or does it not matter, provided the numbers are still coming out right?

• The idea that decadence, demographics, and Christianity caused the collapse of the Western Roman Empire has been out of fashion for a very long time—but there may be a dark seed of truth in Gibbon’s old narrative. What happens if a civilization ceases to produce people who can capably perpetuate the systems that sustain it? Where our civilization is concerned, is public literacy a necessary ingredient of that capability?

  • Which possibility do we find more disturbing: that it is or is not?

1. I am putting “primitive” in quotes because I don’t want to imply any value judgements. What should we call it instead? Classical orality? Old orality? Original orality?