Last week I had the pleasure of reading an article written by Father Walter J. Ong. I would like to bring discuss this article today because I feel what Ong has to say is not only important, but essential to anyone who considers himself or herself a writer as it attempts to explain just what writing has accomplished since its creation and wide-scale use. The article is titled “Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” and I hope that after reading this here today many of you will go out and read the article for yourself as I will only be able to capture a small part of Ong's entire argument.
Living in what Ong calls a “high-technology culture” we cannot understand what writing is separate to what we consider natural to all humans (Ong 19). We write, just as we eat and sleep. We do it everyday and in many cases we do not even realize we are doing it. I recently had a discussion with one of my tutoring groups about the decline of society. The students of this group were convinced that a lack of literacy could lead to this. One of my students brought up the idea of a grocery list with fifty items on it, something commonly seen around an everyday house-hold, and explained how even a task so simple as going to the store would become a daunting one if we were forced to memorize all fifty items on the list before we actually went to the store. Looking back now, I could accomplish this, but I would need to study for several hours before I actually left for the store. An everyday task such as shopping becomes labor, a hard-ship, an incredible challenge, all because of a lack of writing. Because writing is so weaved into what we are, we cannot understand what life would be like without writing. We are bound to writing just as we are to breathing-- it is a skill necessary to succeed in a culture such as ours (Ong 19).
To begin understanding Ong's argument we must take a step back and examine what humans were like before writing. This can be done by looking at a completely oral culture such as the ancient Greeks. The Ancient Greeks did not write. They relied on memorization to preserve the knowledge provided to them by their ancestors so that they could pass it on to their children. If any information, often remembered as tales or stories, was forgotten, then the knowledge that that tale possessed was also lost forever and could not be passed down, unless someone else was found who knew the tale. This is foreign to us today. If one forgets the definition of a word they can effortlessly open a dictionary. If one forgets the plot of a story, they can revisit the original story. Many people today can say that they have memorized a few lines of poetry, but few can say that they have memorized an entire epic. This is because the task of memorizing anything of that length is too daunting, too gruesomely challenging, and, more than anything, too time consuming for anyone to actually do. If we were to spent our lives memorizing entire epics we would have little time for anything else, and as Ong reveals “Exploratory thinking is...a luxury orality can little afford, for energies must be husbanded to keep on constant call the evanescent knowledge that the ages have so laboriously accumulated” (Ong 20). As Ong further points out, 'exploratory thinking' which is thinking that we so often do today in the sciences and the philosophies, is linear. It builds upon itself. This, in general, cannot be done within an oral culture because the time which we spend on interpretation and theories, on innovation and new ideas must be spent, by those in an oral culture, on memorization and recollection. It is only through this memorization that an oral culture has any chance of passing down the knowledge that they possess to their future generations. And, with the business of life today, not many people are willing, or able, to memorize anything of that length and why would they when it is already written down and is easily accessible.
Writing is part of us today. It is expected and essential. And that is, as Ong explains, the reason that we do not normally see writing as a technology. But, as brought up as a comparison, Ong parallels writing to the Greeks with computers to us (Ong 21). Few people today consider the calculator or computer as part of the natural human mental processes, but computers, calculators and writing differ little in what they accomplish. They each allow the user to access information, or perform tasks that they could not do without the use of the technology (21). For example, as I explained above, writing allows the user to look back at previous knowledge without having to memorize it. Therefore, the writer can spend their time interpreting the text that is already written down. They can build on previous knowledge because they don't need to memorize it. The same as this, a calculator allows the user to calculate equations which could not be done easily without the calculator. The calculator allows the user, just as writing allows the reader, to accomplish an incredibly difficult task with simplicity (Ong 21). We are able to recall an immense amount of information, more than could ever be memorized, by simply opening the pages of a book. We are able to make advancements because of the time we save by using technologies such as writing and calculators. Returning to the shopping list example above, I stated that I would be able to accomplish a task such as memorizing fifty items on a shopping list after studying the list, but the task would be incredibly challenging and take an immense amount of time which I now use elsewhere, such as here writing this blog. With the use of writing however, this task becomes simple and effortless. Just the same, if I was asked to add two incredibly large numbers together, I could eventually do it, but it would take a lot of time. A calculator however, would shorten the time spent on this challenge from hours to seconds. The difference however, between seeing writing as a technology just like computers and calculators, and seeing writing as a natural human process is that writing has been around for so long, and has been become such a natural part of our everyday lives that we fail to understand, or are unable to understand, what life would be like without writing. Writing is very much an essential part of what we as humans are today, but, as seen with ancient oral cultures like the Ancient Greeks, it has not always been that way.
So, with this brief introduction into Father Walter J. Ong's article: “Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought” I now leave you with two challenges. The first is that I challenge each and every one of you to go out and read this article. What I have accumulated here is only a small chunk of the knowledge that Father Ong's article possesses, and everyone can benefit in some way from fully understanding what Ong writes in his article. The second is a challenge that I hope will reveal to any who try just how important the technology of writing is in our everyday lives. Attempt an entire day without writing. Force yourself to memorize all the information that is thrown your way: the appointments, the shopping lists, the lectures, and any scribbled notes that you would normally write down. If nothing else, for this day, you will make Plato very happy.
I hope all of you enjoyed reading my blog as much as I enjoyed writing it. Please, leave me feed back as you feel just. Feel free to comment with celebratory praising, or with your thoughts of disagreement and unrest. I would love to hear both.
Until next time my friends,
Yours Hart,
Nick
Works Cited
Ong, Walter J. "Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought." Literacy: a Critical Sourcebook. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. 19-31. Print.
