Apparently, reading scores are down not just in America but throughout the world. This means that, on average, contemporary young people have lower literacy than young people did even ten or twenty years ago.
It's funny to me that Ong is this year's guy, because he's part of a line of academic research that has moved considerably beyond him. (But then, that was also true of Girard.) In my opinion, the bit of his work that remains interesting today is actually his excellent study of Peter Ramus. Still, I agree with you that he is this year's guy: he keeps popping up in my reading too.
I think, however, that the reason he's this year's guy makes it inappropriate for him to be this year's guy. (This is not a criticism of your essay but of the fact that Ong is this year's guy.) Here's my reasoning. 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.
What a great synthesis! I agree completely. Wish I had you around when I was writing this post :) How did you already know this stuff??? Did you study it for your PhD?
Very good introduction to Ong. I first read him in an undergrad English class in 2011, have returned to the book multiple times, and have included him and his ideas in a few of my own essays. Even though the discourse will move on, he's an important thinker and is worth reading.
If anyone is interested in exploring the ideas of orality and literacy in the form of a novel, Ismail Kadare's The File on H is a fictionalization of Milman Parry's trip to the Balkans to record oral poets and does a great job contrasting the literate worldview with the oral worldview. Kadare's Broken April is another good one, although it's more focused on the divide between a traditional way of life and modernity. Kadare, although a novelist himself, is very sensitive to everything that's lost in the transition to literacy.
I think you would really like it--it's one of the most enjoyable books I've read, very smart but also quite funny and mixes in the plot of a thriller as well. If you do read it, let me know and I'll share the article I wrote about it.
The leader of an Aboriginal clan in the Northern Territory's Arnhem Land told me his father and other elders trained him for years in the group's mythology, which took about eight hours to recite in full. He had trouble learning the English alphabet from a missionary, because the young males among his people weren't allowed to look directly at strange women. Thought that might interest you.
Basically, if you feel a culture somehow isn’t advanced enough, then you can just say they haven’t “fully interiorized” literacy yet. This is convenient as a rhetorical tactic, because it means the assertions in this book are impossible to falsify.
This is such a convenient tactic though (reminds me of the "No true Scotsman" fallacy)! So many gurus use it (maybe because it's targeted at an audience that relies more on orality than literacy). I wonder if a highly literacy-oriented person has an obvious advantage in gaining influence over an orality-dominated audience – e.g to form cults, to win elections, etc.
You can't really talk about Milman Parry without mentioning the work of Albert Lord and especially "The Singer of Tales," wich descibes how he did the anthropologist thing and studied Slavic epic-singers (I don't recall the Slavic word offhand) _in vivo_. One interesting detail I recall — I read it thirty years or so ago — is how a singer would insist that he sang the tale "the same" every time despite Lord's observation that he not only made large variations, but could change the length of the tale by a significant amount.
Hey wait, not many people I know are literate. Never been. Reisted it. Maybe it's I live in regional Australia, where some people barely talk. Also, most don't make videos, wouldn't know how, they watch them. The possibility of production isn't the same as the thick community of preliteracy, with its lack of distinction between fine art, performance, song, and story. Is fandom the real modern thickness? I keep going back to a conversation about oral literature in India Rushdie and Grass had, Rushdie saying his work was the opposite of literary, it bore traces of performance all through it. The words in a performance, video, whatever, are like lyrics compared to poetry, whose differences I can never hold my mind on for more than a moment. I once worked with an actor whose means of generating performance was to go full stream of consciousness. This is of course intensely literary but it's only an abandonment of conventional marks rendering thought communicable. His performance added all the sentences back in. His music. His beat. Iliading the crap out of his material, when it worked. I don't know what I'm saying except I suspect my theatrical respect for so-called nomadic people—used to teach mime at the state ballet school back when I was a puppeteer—and their abstract art, would make me want to throw Ong across the room. Bam. And have a look at Adam Roberts's Lake of Darkness for a post-literacy laff.
So true about Ong being this (last, actually) year's guy to explain everything. Case in point - last year I wrote about how Ong's "proverbs as wisdom formulas" is a good analogy for reasoning in LLMs:
Ong is one of those guys I was nominally aware of doing "media studies" (fake) in college, but I guess he was a little harder to sound cool quoting than McLuhan was (or even Neil Postman, who had graduated into faxlore around that time: https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/amusing-ourselves-to-death/) so I never bothered learning what his deal was. I can't say I'm all that impressed by this description.
Reading your gloss on him, I'm reminded of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which I think blew up for similar reasons; it doesn't straight up say that the "wordcels" among us by saying our mad linguistic skillz make us superior to others, but that's surely the implication. (Big citation needed on the "Arabs rely on formulaic thought" quote!) And just like Sapir-Whorf, Ong's "evidence" is anthropological anecdotes about "primitive" cultures, which I suspect would all crumble when subjected to the standard lefty critique of anthropology.
(If this all sounds cynical of me: wouldn't Ong's point be equally true, truer even, of mathematics?)
Slipping in to suggest that Ong's main point isn't that literacy is superior to orality; it's just *different,* and it ingrains patterns of thought and action on the level of the individual and organizational structures on the level of the group that aren't possible (or at least not easily attained) in a pre- or nonliterate milieu. It is like any other form of technology in this regard—see Orality and Literacy's subtitle—whether we're talking about fire, agriculture, telegraph lines, or Twitter.
On mathematics: while I can't speak to so-called "primitive" cultures that don't have any defined numbers beyond three, twenty, etc., I find myself thinking of the geometers of classical Greece. Imagine doing trigonometry or playing with conic sections if you didn't have algebra as a cognitive tool in your arsenal and couldn't take any shortcuts via a^2+b^2=c^2 or x^2=ay. You'd probably have to think about what you were doing in a somewhat less abstract way than what we're used to.
It's funny to me that Ong is this year's guy, because he's part of a line of academic research that has moved considerably beyond him. (But then, that was also true of Girard.) In my opinion, the bit of his work that remains interesting today is actually his excellent study of Peter Ramus. Still, I agree with you that he is this year's guy: he keeps popping up in my reading too.
I think, however, that the reason he's this year's guy makes it inappropriate for him to be this year's guy. (This is not a criticism of your essay but of the fact that Ong is this year's guy.) Here's my reasoning. 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.
What a great synthesis! I agree completely. Wish I had you around when I was writing this post :) How did you already know this stuff??? Did you study it for your PhD?
I am just obsessed with memory because I worry I have a bad one, lol.
not to out-hipster myself but i was already doing ongiana back in january 2024 https://samkriss.substack.com/p/before-i-reach-my-enemy-bring-me
I like that post! Yes I’m not surprised you were ahead of the curve—you’re literally who I first learned about Ong from :)
Very good introduction to Ong. I first read him in an undergrad English class in 2011, have returned to the book multiple times, and have included him and his ideas in a few of my own essays. Even though the discourse will move on, he's an important thinker and is worth reading.
If anyone is interested in exploring the ideas of orality and literacy in the form of a novel, Ismail Kadare's The File on H is a fictionalization of Milman Parry's trip to the Balkans to record oral poets and does a great job contrasting the literate worldview with the oral worldview. Kadare's Broken April is another good one, although it's more focused on the divide between a traditional way of life and modernity. Kadare, although a novelist himself, is very sensitive to everything that's lost in the transition to literacy.
Wow this sounds like an incredible book. Thank you for the recommendation, I will look into this.
I think you would really like it--it's one of the most enjoyable books I've read, very smart but also quite funny and mixes in the plot of a thriller as well. If you do read it, let me know and I'll share the article I wrote about it.
I loved Broken April, but it is the only book of his that I have read.
Declining literacy has certainly sent plenty of people back to Ong, but I'd nominate Neil Postman as even more influential at the moment. I have come across references to Postman's _Amusing Ourselves to Death_ as "prophetic" often in the past two years by intellectuals discussing the impact of technology on reading/attention. Perhaps the most germane example is by James Marriot's viral essay from last year, "The dawn of the post-literate society" (https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1), which begins with an epigraph from Postman and discusses his work extensively (though, to be fair, Marriot also discusses Ong too!). Postman received high praise from novelist Zadie Smith on the Ezra Klein show (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-zadie-smith.html). Katha Pollit cites Postman as a media theorist in The New Republic (https://newrepublic.com/article/186804/entertainment-mangled-public-discourse). He's in the Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/07/17/neil-postman-amusing-ourselves-to-death/). The Atlantic too! https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/are-we-having-too-much-fun/523143/
I'm sure there are plenty of Substackers discussing Ong, but I feel like Postman is a better candidate as "the guy" right now.
I remember when Christopher Lasch was previously the rage. It must have been 1979, when The Culture of Narcissism came out. Good times.
The leader of an Aboriginal clan in the Northern Territory's Arnhem Land told me his father and other elders trained him for years in the group's mythology, which took about eight hours to recite in full. He had trouble learning the English alphabet from a missionary, because the young males among his people weren't allowed to look directly at strange women. Thought that might interest you.
Picking at nits: Luria mostly spoke to farmers, not nomads.
Thanks for the correction! It’s a bit hard to get the sense from Ong’s book about who exactly Luria was studying.
Interesting read about something I hadn't thought about. I wonder if we can learn from orality that it is a way of avoiding the surveillance culture?
Basically, if you feel a culture somehow isn’t advanced enough, then you can just say they haven’t “fully interiorized” literacy yet. This is convenient as a rhetorical tactic, because it means the assertions in this book are impossible to falsify.
This is such a convenient tactic though (reminds me of the "No true Scotsman" fallacy)! So many gurus use it (maybe because it's targeted at an audience that relies more on orality than literacy). I wonder if a highly literacy-oriented person has an obvious advantage in gaining influence over an orality-dominated audience – e.g to form cults, to win elections, etc.
You can't really talk about Milman Parry without mentioning the work of Albert Lord and especially "The Singer of Tales," wich descibes how he did the anthropologist thing and studied Slavic epic-singers (I don't recall the Slavic word offhand) _in vivo_. One interesting detail I recall — I read it thirty years or so ago — is how a singer would insist that he sang the tale "the same" every time despite Lord's observation that he not only made large variations, but could change the length of the tale by a significant amount.
Props for "can't read good." I love Zoolander.
Hey wait, not many people I know are literate. Never been. Reisted it. Maybe it's I live in regional Australia, where some people barely talk. Also, most don't make videos, wouldn't know how, they watch them. The possibility of production isn't the same as the thick community of preliteracy, with its lack of distinction between fine art, performance, song, and story. Is fandom the real modern thickness? I keep going back to a conversation about oral literature in India Rushdie and Grass had, Rushdie saying his work was the opposite of literary, it bore traces of performance all through it. The words in a performance, video, whatever, are like lyrics compared to poetry, whose differences I can never hold my mind on for more than a moment. I once worked with an actor whose means of generating performance was to go full stream of consciousness. This is of course intensely literary but it's only an abandonment of conventional marks rendering thought communicable. His performance added all the sentences back in. His music. His beat. Iliading the crap out of his material, when it worked. I don't know what I'm saying except I suspect my theatrical respect for so-called nomadic people—used to teach mime at the state ballet school back when I was a puppeteer—and their abstract art, would make me want to throw Ong across the room. Bam. And have a look at Adam Roberts's Lake of Darkness for a post-literacy laff.
1. Fact. The role of factual news and lore in Commedia del Arte, and in First Australian art. This goes somewhere in here.
Thank you for the opportunity to feel smug about reading Orality and Literacy two years ago! I so rarely anticipate the zeitgeist—feels good.
So true about Ong being this (last, actually) year's guy to explain everything. Case in point - last year I wrote about how Ong's "proverbs as wisdom formulas" is a good analogy for reasoning in LLMs:
https://hyperstellar.substack.com/p/magic-spells-for-intelligence
Ong is one of those guys I was nominally aware of doing "media studies" (fake) in college, but I guess he was a little harder to sound cool quoting than McLuhan was (or even Neil Postman, who had graduated into faxlore around that time: https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/amusing-ourselves-to-death/) so I never bothered learning what his deal was. I can't say I'm all that impressed by this description.
Reading your gloss on him, I'm reminded of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which I think blew up for similar reasons; it doesn't straight up say that the "wordcels" among us by saying our mad linguistic skillz make us superior to others, but that's surely the implication. (Big citation needed on the "Arabs rely on formulaic thought" quote!) And just like Sapir-Whorf, Ong's "evidence" is anthropological anecdotes about "primitive" cultures, which I suspect would all crumble when subjected to the standard lefty critique of anthropology.
(If this all sounds cynical of me: wouldn't Ong's point be equally true, truer even, of mathematics?)
Slipping in to suggest that Ong's main point isn't that literacy is superior to orality; it's just *different,* and it ingrains patterns of thought and action on the level of the individual and organizational structures on the level of the group that aren't possible (or at least not easily attained) in a pre- or nonliterate milieu. It is like any other form of technology in this regard—see Orality and Literacy's subtitle—whether we're talking about fire, agriculture, telegraph lines, or Twitter.
On mathematics: while I can't speak to so-called "primitive" cultures that don't have any defined numbers beyond three, twenty, etc., I find myself thinking of the geometers of classical Greece. Imagine doing trigonometry or playing with conic sections if you didn't have algebra as a cognitive tool in your arsenal and couldn't take any shortcuts via a^2+b^2=c^2 or x^2=ay. You'd probably have to think about what you were doing in a somewhat less abstract way than what we're used to.
Nitpicks:
- The Iliad and the Odyssey don’t rhyme.
- The Closing of the American Mind is by Allan Bloom, not Harold Bloom.