Ongs three phases of culture

1
Ongs three phases of culture

• oral
• print
• electronic

2
Ong saw orality as a cultural system

• a historical era
• a medium of symbolic transmission
• an information network
• a style
• an element of communications systems that followed

3
Ongs features of oral culture

• Memorization
• Concrete, rather than abstract
• Agonism
• Stock characters and phrases
• Participation
• Homeostatic
• Events and acts

4
Platos concerns about writing

• Writing destroys memory
• Writing is inhumane and artificial
• Writing is unresponsive
• Writing cant defend itself
• Writing cant control its audience

5
Writing restructures consciousness

• Epistemological changes (how we know what we
  know)
• Ontological shifts (how we think about or
  understand existence)
• Skepticism
• Temporal and spatial shifts

6
Print transforms society

• Labour practices
• Capitalism
• Authority
• Visual materials
• Prose
• Stasis and the decline of Latin

• Indexing
• Privacy
• Spatial conventions
• Content expanded