Writing and Thought
This podcast analyzes Walter Ong’s ideas about writing as a technology that not only allows communication but also affects thought.
This podcast analyzes Walter Ong’s ideas about writing as a technology that not only allows communication but also affects thought.
October 23rd, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Great job pulling out some of the most important passages from Ong’s article. I recognize your signature reading response style here, too—reading a passage you initially disagree with, explaining the reasons for that concern, and then helping yourself to reconsider by engaging the writer’s evidence further—and I appreciate that here as I much as I do on the wiki.
One specific thought to think further about: you mention it’s easy to understand what Ong meant when he wrote that the new technology brings “the critique into existence,” but in your analysis of that quote, you return to the form of technology to explain this. Ong means something else here—Plato’s “critique of writing, was possible only because of the effects that writing was beginning to have on mental processes” (106). This speaks to Ong’s overall thesis that writing as a technology has transformed consciousness, one point that you don’t really focus on as you detail the smaller (and fascinating), other points he makes.
Check.