Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2004

Taking Ong’s “Voice as a Summons for Belief: Literature, Faith, and the Divided Self” (1958/2002) as a starting point, this article extends it to electronic media. Secondary orality also summons belief. This occurs not only through framing, as Ong argues, but also through the manipulation of rhetorical and linguistic situations. Electronic media include either delay or distance; they require both a belief in the interlocutor and a belief about the media. Because of this, they also require more interpretation.

Walter J. Ong, SJ (1912-2003) outlived his former teacher and friend Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) by more than two decades. Never publicized by the popular media to the extent McLuhan was, Ong’s star in the galaxy of notable persons rose in the 1960s alongside that of his far more publicized friend. But Ong further established his stellar reputation by publishing two impressive 350-page collections of essays in the 1970s and three book-length studies in the 1980s, including Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), his most widely known work. Thus, he lived a long and remarkably productive life. In the first part of this article, I recount my experiences in taking courses from Ong at Saint Louis University in the 1960s and some subsequent experiences as well. Then in the second part, I set forth my personal reflections on the importance of various themes in Ong’s extensive body of work from the 1940s through 2002.

The consummate scholar, Walter J. Ong wrote with clarity and grace detailed investigations and far-reaching speculations within a dozen disciplines. But Ong not only presented a model for how scholarship should be done; he also modeled a rationale for why it should be done. He urged that scholarship be dialogue, conversation rooted in I-thou relationships, with a recognition of the historicity of all human knowing, the radical incompleteness of all human utterance, and the consequent need to interpret all statement within the living present. His own scholarship is an expression of his personalist philosophical leanings and his Incarnational Christian beliefs, but those who do not share his philosophical and religious orientations can still appreciate his remarkable insights and profit from the example he gave for how teaching and scholarship are anchored in trust. This personalism is a motivation for Ong’s several investigations into media ecology, into the transformations of the word. The promise of electronic technology, with its implications of secondary orality, is not a return to a primitive or pristine oral-aural psychodynamics, but rather an attempt, through reflection, to find how, within an evolving consciousness and evolving world, new media can promote personalist encounters in original ways.

Long-standing enmities abound between the Enlightenment spheres of economic, moral, and civic society. Walter Ong’s notion of orality as a rhetorical mindset, which encompasses social, epistemological, and discursive elements, casts these conflicts in terms of communication culture.

This article suggests some ways of understanding how young adult perceptions of literacy are shaped by the present media environment. It begins with a brief description of the modes of learning and knowing that have characterized oral cultures on the one hand and print-literate cultures on the other. Finally, I argue that our present multimedia environment has fostered orally biased conceptions and approaches to writing among today’s young adults.

Ong explored the role of the spoken voice as it relates to human interiority as well as the psychological effects of writing’s development in fostering exteriority, a loss of voice, and a preference for the visible and objectively observable. Ong’s analyses offer potential insights for contemporary psychology’s rejection of radical positivism and its turn to discourse, narrative production, and the recovery of voice in individual human experience. Furthermore, his investigations of technology’s impact on human noetic processes address crucial questions about human differences in various fields of cross-cultural and ethnic psychological research.

Walter Ong’s depiction of oral mind and culture reveals the importance of and the means to distinguish the discipline of speech as antecedent and corrective to disciplines and practices later engendered by literacy.

The importance of Walter Ong’s phenomenology is illustrated through some issues arising out of his ideas about visualism. The contemporary relevance of these ideas and issues is suggested through a brief consideration of two aspects of the university culture today: the industrialization of higher education, and the ascendancy of deconstruction.

Wasser, Frederick. Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002. 270 pp. Cloth $50.00, ISBN 0-292-79145-3. Paper $22.95, ISBN 0-292-79146-1.