Matter of Time

I kind of feel like I am repeating myself in this blog post, but this feels like it is going to be more about the discrepancy/discrepancies between an oral and literate world. Not surprising considering that this is the intent of Ong’s argument, but it does make my posts feel redundant. However, in an effort to appear slightly more diverse, I’ll try to focus on Ong’s discussion of oral (memory) records vs. written.

Throughout the last half of the text, chapter 4 onward, Ong repeatedly touched on the isolation and intellectual disengagement from texts. He does not posit that texts are less intellectually stimulating or worse for intellectual discovery/discourse, but the reader is necessarily disengaged and cannot enter into discourse with the author.  This distance from the author is most obviously due to gaps in time or space. It is possible to read a text and agree, disagree, or “argue” with an author, but in literate cultures this moves into the realm of the abstract and has to reason things within one’s own mind or with one’s peers who are familiar with the same text. Literates are no longer presented with an opportunity to immediately interact with the primary author or orator and hash out new conclusions on the spot. Again, this isn’t a wholly negative situation because the advance of literacy allowed for the proliferation of additional documents which may support, refute, or otherwise build upon or contribute to a conversation that would not have otherwise been available.

Beyond changing the way literate cultures become involved and engage with new information, Ong also addresses how oral records had and in some cases still have more veracity than written.

Ong writes, “Witnesses were prima facie more credible than texts because they could be challenged and made to defend their statements” (95). This applies to the situation noted previously in which one can’t confront the person he disagrees with. We also see this hold over in our modern legal system where an individual’s spoken statement in court carries more weight than one that may be written.

 In the same section of the text, Ong also addresses how literacy ultimately shaped the conception of time in our own and other literate cultures. In oral cultures only the most scholarly or those individuals entrenched in a church were concerned with the specific year and/or where they fit in the wider timeline. However as record keeping evolved and engagement with these “distant” texts evolved most everyone became aware of a uniform time system and where they fit on that timeline. One could also argue that this led to the widespread ability or desire to abstract one’s future rather than living day to day. With the spread of technology and literacy things became a little more amorphous, but also finite. Ideas built upon previous ideas are increasingly ethereal, but things may be codified, organized, and otherwise delineated to give a sense of finality or what not.

Ong goes on to cover a ton of other topics in these final chapters (including something as simple, but important as how we scan things with our eyes), but I found the above points to be quite interesting and illustrative of how profound the spread of literacy has been in human society.