Presence of the Word – Electronic Era
Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. The Terry Lectures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.
Ong discusses the third stage of verbalization and notes that the process is sequential:
The past century has seen the world enter into a new stage beyond orality and script and print, a stage characterized by the use of electronics for verbal communication. There has been a sequence within this stage, too: telegraph (electronic processing of the alphabetized word), telephone (electronic processing of the oral word), radio (first for telegraphy, then for voice; an extension first of telegraph and then of telephone), sound pictures (electronic sound added to electrically projected vision), television (electronic vision added to electronic sound), and computers (word silenced once more, and thought processes pretty completely reorganized by extreme quantification). (87-88).
Being this text was written in1967; the view (and actual abilities and uses) of computers was vastly different than in our current time. Following Ong’s structure above, we could now consider the computer to consist of various combinations of electronic processing of the silenced word, (inter)active words, vision, and sound. It is used for communication at a distance and now could be viewed as even supplanting some previous communication methods: email potentially supplants postal mail, Skype potentially supplants telephone conversations, and to a certain extent video conferencing potentially supplants the face-to-face meeting with those who would otherwise need to fly to a different location for a meeting. But this is not generally the case, as we do not stop using one communication method just because a new one comes along.
When man began to write, he did not cease talking. … When print was developed, man did not stop writing. …Now that we have electronic communication, we shall not cease to write and print. (89).
The new technologies do not actually supplant or replace preceding technologies. Rather, they tend to alter the way in which they are used. Skype, and related tools, do not replace the telephone; the land-line telephone is still used. However, far more common is the use of the cell-phone. Postal mail still exists and people find various benefits to using it, such as the fact that it seems more personal.