The Reverend Father Walter Jackson Ong, PhD (November 30, 1912 – August 12, 2003), was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian and philosopher. His major interest was in exploring how the transition from orality to literacy influenced culture and changed human consciousness. In 1978 Ong served as elected president of the Modern Language Association of America.
Orality and Literacy (1982)[edit]
In Ong's most widely known work, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), he attempts to identify the distinguishing characteristics of orality by examining thought and its verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy (especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population.
Ong drew heavily on the work of Eric A. Havelock, who suggested a fundamental shift in the form of thought coinciding with the transition from orality to literacy in Ancient Greece. Ong describes writing as a technology that must be laboriously learned, and which effects the first transformation of human thought from the world of sound to the world of sight. This transition has implications for structuralism, deconstruction, speech-act and reader-response theory, the teaching of reading and writing skills to males and females, social studies, biblical studies, philosophy, and cultural history generally.
