Can We Go Back?
Podcast:
A look at Walter Ong’s “Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought,” exploring just how much of an impact writing and literacy has had on human thought. Are we becoming a solitary society? Where does orality fit into our modern society? And where do we go from here. This podcast brings these questions to the forefront and attempts to provide some answers as well as encourage others to come up with their own answers.
Black Silk by Syenta is licensed under a Attribution Noncommercial (3.0).
(16 votes)
Comments
We're all new at this
I think you did a nice job of conceiving your podcast as a whole. Editing together the separate recordings isn't easy. The choice of music was appropriate and set a thought-provoking tone. As someone who has never made a podcast before I was impressed by your ability to adapt the content of the "essay" to the form, asking questions and allowing your listeners space to think. Nice touch.
I appreciate the summary of Ong. You state that non-literal societies and babies or children "do just fine" despite being pre-literate. I would have liked to hear evidence or examples of what you mean by "do just fine."
I also appreciate your concerns about the isolating impact that a loss of aurality (or orality) has had, and might have still on our society. I agree that an openness to the changes new technology brings is a valid and necessary stand in facing such changes, but because such things are emotionally charged, such a stand may be easier said than done.
Solitary Society
I’m fascinated by this Ong article as well. It’s difficult to conceive of writing as a technology—something that is not necessarily “natural” but does in fact restructure the way we make sense of the world. I think it is important that you incorporated oral societies into your podcast. By contrasting our notions of writing, literacy, knowledge, etc. with similar notions in other societies (or the absence of notions we perceived to be natural) we can more accurately determine how our culture and its technologies reshape our material bodies and cognitive functions.
You mentioned that we are becoming a “solitary society.” I’m interested in the ways the diction of people on various sides of many issues changes the terms by which the conversation is occurring. Whereas a technophile might describe technology as making us a “connected society,” a neo-Luddite might describe technology as making us a “solitary society,” bemoaning the loss of face-to-face contact, effort expended in connects, and so on. However, your podcast—being informed by Ong—uses what could be interpreted as a reactionary phrase, and recasts the terms by which your conversation is taking place. Since you agree with Ong that writing is a technology, the idea that we might be en route to becoming solitary includes what others take to be naturalized. Who is to say that our society cannot naturalize the way we use technology nowadays (or will in the future)? So if we are becoming more solitary, how is that any less natural than what came before? Sure, it is different than what came before but all that compelled us to deem it as natural was repeated exposure and a presented reality that we didn’t question. [These questions are not directed at your podcast… they are musings that your podcast inspired.]
Since the previous generation presents reading and writing to us at an early age, it truly is—as you mention—exceedingly difficult to envision our world without it. By removing writing, we remove the way our mind works—we would have a different world.
I appreciated your choice of music as well. I feel as if I’ve heard that piano somewhere before while listening to an audiobook but I cannot place it.
Thanks for the thought-provoking podcast on Ong’s ideas.
Thank you for commenting on
Thank you for commenting on my podcast. You brought up some very intriguing points. I didn't really consider that technology is making us more of a "connected society," rather than a "soliditary society." I supposed it is all in how you look at it. While some people, like me, tend to prefer face-to-face interations with people, while others prefer the ability to interact with people through texts, IMs, email, and such technologies. Like you brought up in your response, natural is a subjective term and "Who is to say that our society cannot naturalize the way we use technology nowadays (or will in the future)?" Your comment has certainly opened my mind to the idea of a "connected society" and what can be considered "natural."
The Inca
For one of the first podcasts I think you did a great job!
I think the notion of approaching orality and writing by considering those who do not use a writing system (you reference small children as an example) is very interesting and it immediately brought to mind the ancient Inca in Peru, who never established a writing system. Despite this (and despite the fact that they never invented wheels) the Inca were able to communicate over vast distances, mostly through oral messages, and also through a complicated system of strings knotted in precise patterns (which also makes me think of Madame Dufarge).
What I think is really interesting (and will make this comment relevant, I promise) is that the Inca empire only collapsed when they were infiltrated and overtaken by the Spanish, who arrived in the cities and read a longwinded speech written by the king about their power to take the land. The Inca, of course, did not speak or read Spanish so this was merely symbolic justification for the Spanish conquistadors, but it's interesting to think that this is a case where writing, even just one written document, manages to bring down an entire orally-based civilization. I'm not saying writing is solely (or even partly) responsible (and I'm also not saying the slaughter of thousands of people is 'interesting'), but I do think it begs a question: could oral societies have persevered into the 21st century or was this just an early example of a people empowered by written language overcoming (in whatever respect; not necessarily militaristically in certain cases) a nation without writing? We've been indoctrinated from birth into a nation based on written language, but had we been born elsewhere or at another time, would we still have remained unaffected? If we can indeed return to a time before written language, do we want to?