Quotes from Walter J. Ong

Print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion.

Human society first formed itself with the aid of oral speech, becoming literate very late in its history, and at first only in certain groups. Homo sapiens has been in existence for between 30,000 and 50,000 years. The earliest script dates from only 6000 years ago.

The shift from orality to literacy and on to electronic processing engages social, economic, political, religious and other structures. These, however, are only indirect concerns of the present book, which treats rather the differences in 'mentality' between oral and writing cultures.

Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.

Indeed, the diary demands, in a way, the maximum fictionalizing of the utterer and the addressee. Writing is always a kind of imitation talking, and in a diary I therefore am pretending that I am talking to myself.

Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness and never more than when they affect the word.

The clichés in political denunciations in many low-technology, developing cultures—enemy of the people, capitalist war-mongers —that strike high literates as mindless are residual formulary essentials of oral thought processes.

Homeric Greece and everything that philosophy after Plato stood for was, however superficially cordial and continuous, in fact deeply antagonistic, if often at the unconscious rather than the conscious level.

Many of the features we have taken for granted in thought and expression in literature, philosophy and science, and even in oral discourse among literates, are not directly native to human existence as such but have come into being because of the resources which the technology of writing makes available to human consciousness.

Learning to read and write disables the oral poet, Lord found: it introduces into his mind the concept of a text as controlling the narrative and thereby interferes with the oral composing processes, which have nothing to do with texts but are 'the remembrance of songs sung

Manuscripts were not easy to read, by later typographic standards, and what readers found in manuscripts they tended to commit at least somewhat to memory. Relocating material in a manuscript was not always easy.

Male bonding groups are associations of loners. The male values a companion whom he can stand up against and who can stand up against him: each receives assurance from the other's decently adversative stance, for it reminds him of his own needs and resources. This masculine intense friendly aggression is foreign to most women's experience.