More from Walter Ong's
Orality and Literacy
(1982). (long I realize, but try it anyway)
Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objection commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus and in the Seventh Letter against writing.
Writing, Plato has Socrates say, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only int the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, [Socrates] urges, writing destroys memory. Thos who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack... Today, parents and others fear that pocket calculators provide an external resource of memorized multiplication tables. Calculators weaken the mind, relieve it of work that keeps it strong.
One weakness in Plato's position was that, to make his objections effective, he put them into writing.
Writing and print and the computer are all ways of technologizing the word. Once the word is technologized, there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available. Moreover, the new technology is not merely used to convey the critique: in fact, it brought the critique into existence. Plato's analytic thought...was possible only because of the effects that writing was beginning to have on mental processes.
5 responses to "plato, writing, and computers | walter ong"
ooohhh, pretty deep. And weird.
the medium is the message.
You couldnt hear it but I just verbally responded to your post. It was really good, and it got me away from the technology for a bit. The people here in the coffee shop were a little concerned though.
Those are pretty good points. What troubles me (not deeply, just disconcertingly so), is that there's no going backwards on that continum from oral/mental to writing to technology.
Once you move your culture forwards, you can't really go back again.
That's PROBABLY not a bad thing, but I'm not convinced it's unequivicoably so.
Booker - I forget to say this earlier, but I definitely cracked up when I read your note.
Jake - yeah, this is an issue: has communication technologies (McLuhan: "extensions of man") been blessing or curses. In it's nature, media studies rose up as a cultural critique, so it doesn't have a cheesy, "cool!" view. But Ong would definitely say that at the day, writing followed by print has have overwhelmingly positive features.
Sometimes you wonder when reading him though if we're working with a 18th century view of culture that sees all cultures on a spectrum growing from primitive to advanced (the ideal then being Western Europe, of course). The post-modern critique was to level the playing field on that thought.
Still, I think I can say that communication, extended, is both good and bad in the same way that humans are both good creations yet signicantly marred. The human condition is hardly filtered, and maybe emphasized in mass comm.
Oh, and there's no sense of "going back," but you can imitate old ways. Ong goes on to talk of "secondary orality." And others have taken his research to propose a "tertiary orality." More in that if you're interested.
Yeah, post more about that stuff....that DOES sound interesting.
I took a oral culture class my senior year where we talked about some of this stuff, and it's certainly stuck w/ me as part of that whole postmodern philosophy thing I've internalized.
But I think the issue is a lot more complex than they pretended it was (ie. 'don't screw with the oral culture with your fancy modern writing crap--it's not necessarily better.') But I haven't figured out how...