Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought

Walter J. Ong's main claim is that writing is most definitely a technology even though most people don't think of it that way. People assume writing is natural, but as Ong points out, oral expression is what is natural to humans; writing is just as unnatural as people perceive computers to be. Ong goes on to explain the many differences between writing and speaking. He also alludes to the idea of "haves" and "have-nots" because it seems as though people who are able to write effectively are seen as "literate" and "haves" and those who use oral communication and do not write things down are seen as "illiterate" and "have-nots."

Five sentences:

1. "Functionally, literate persons, those who regularly assimilate discourse such as this, are not simply thinking and speaking human beings but chirographically thinking and speaking human beings (latterly conditioned also by print and by electronics)." --literate people are seen as literate because they are well versed in electronics and and various forms of print media. 

2. "Although we take writing so much for granted as to forget that it is technology, writing is in a way the most drastic of the three technologies of the word. It initiated what printing and electronics only continued, the physical reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone real, spoken words exist." --if writing was never invented, we wouldn't have the technologies we have today. Writing is an invention that changed how we as a society operate.

3. "Whereas in oral communication the source (speaker) and the recipient (hearer) are necessarily present to one another, writing distances the source of the communication (the writer) from the recipient (the reader)." --this is one of the differences between writing and oral communication. When someone reads something, the writer can be in the same room or thousands of miles away and unaware that someone is reading their work. But in oral communication, there is a very high likelihood that the people are in the same room together (unless it is skype or a phone call, which are new technologies that oral communicators back in the day could have never anticipated).

4. "They separate the knower from the known more spectacularly than writing does. Between the knower and the known, print interposes elaborate mechanical contrivances and operations of a different order of complexity than writing." --electronics separate the "haves" and the "have-nots."

5. "Writing separates the known from the knower more definitely than the original orally grounded maneuver of naming does, but it also unites the knower and the known more consciously and more articulately." --since writing is a form of technology, and technology separates society, writing does the same, unlike oral communication which is the original way of communicating. However, oral communication is not always accurate, but writing is because you have a record of what someone said rather than just relying on memory. 

Something I want more info on:

On page 26 when Ong writes that administration is unknown in oral cultures, I wonder how the student/teacher binary got to be the way it is now. When teachers and students interact orally in a classroom, there is a clear hierarchy; the teacher is in charge of the students. So this is kind of the opposite of what is being said about oral communication.