Presence of the Word
Man communicates with his whole body, and yet the word is his primary medium. Communication, like knowledge itself, flowers in speech (1).
Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. The Terry Lectures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.
This work, published in 1967, reveals many of the origins of Ong’s more popular Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge, 2002. Here, he discusses the history of language and communication from purely oral cultures to the chirographic era to print, and on to the electronic era. He states that, in terms of communication media, cultures can be divided into three successive stages, which are essentially stages of verbalization:
- Oral or oral-aural;
- Script, which reaches critical breakthroughs with the invention first of the alphabet and then later of alphabetic movable type; and
- Electronic.
Orality and Writing as Sound and Sight
While we experience and receive information form all our senses–smells, tastes, and touches communicate information in varying ways and degrees–it is sight and sound that are most powerful for our thinking.
Freudians have long pointed out that for abstract thinking the proximate senses–smell, taste, and in a special way touch…–must be minimized in favor of the more abstract hearing and sight. (6).
The word is originally a phenomenon of sound and is therefore time-based. Sound exists only when it is passing out of existence as oppose to a visual image or symbol which is a static, present item. The written word, which begins as a spoken product, makes the word relevant to space as well as time.
Because words are primarily spoken things–writing transposes language to a spatial medium, but the language so transposed has come into existence in the world of sound and remains permanently a part of this world. (3).
[B]ecause it consists of silent words, writing introduces a whole new set of structures within the psyche: communication which lacks the normal social aspect of communication, encounter with one who is not present, participation in the thought of others without commitment or involvement. (126).