Effects of Writing and Print on Rhetoric

The reading this week focused on the effects of writing and print on rhetoric and how our society uses rhetoric. Additionally if focused on the transformation from an oral based society to a literature based society. According to Ong, literacy is different from orality in that it involves writing and print. This difference he says is causing us to become much more reliant upon literacy and text rather than orality. He even attempted to discover more about orality by observing areas where literacy has not become a large part of the culture yet and observing the differences between the oral society and the literate one. He claimed writing is like technology that we must learn and it requires a shift in society’s thinking along with their practices. I find this even more fascinating since this piece was written in 1982 and as such seems to give a bit of a societal timeline. When Ong wrote this society was already text based, however this has only grown since then. People in our society are externalizing their information at an ever increasing rate and the medium for this is text and literacy. The phone in ones pocket now has a vast aray of accessible information both personal and public all in the form of literacy. If you ask someone in their twenties a question that they don’t know the answer too, instead of consulting a scholar on the issue they would consult the almighty Google in search for your answer.

Wolf in addition focuses on the understanding of peoples interpretation of said literacy. Basically, Wolf tried to understand the complexity and workings of reading and how society adopted it. According to her, society changed rapidly with the occurrence of reading and writing. The reading became less symbol based and more abstract. This requires our brains to change and rewire themselves she says. I would wonder however, is the transition over yet? Obviously our society if text based now, and was fully oral based at one point in history. However, I wonder if our society will one day be fully text based? Though it seems like it may be already, there is still a large portion of society based upon orality such as teaching and the legal system and such. Though these systems rely heavily upon text to be affective, are we fully text based already? Is there more of a transition to come? I would say that in my opinion, just seeing the extenede reliance upon text from when Ong wrote his piece until now, there is still rome to change and grow more text based.