Chapter 7 summary from Ong

In this final chapter, Ong suggests that the concepts he has outlined in this book might provide inspiration for new interpretation by adherents of New Criticism and Formalism, Structuralism, textual and deconstructionist analysis, Speech-act and Reader- Response theory as well as those engaged in the study of literary history, the social sciences, philosophy and biblical studies.

At the end of this chapter, Ong goes to great pains to indicate that he feels that neither orality nor literacy is superior. Myron C. Tuman, in Words, Tools, and Technology (College English, 1983), seems to have missed this. At one point Tuman criticize s Ong for conveying "the sense that literacy offers a vast improvement over earlier techniques for storing verbal meaning," and implies that this means that Ong feels that literacy is superior to orality (770). Later, however, he criticizes Ong for depic ting literacy as opposite and somehow less attractive than primary orality (777). Perhaps Tuman's confusion has to do with Ong's choice of words in stating that "both orality, and the growth of literacy out of orality, are necessary for evolution of cons ciousness"(175). In a "survival of the fittest" sense of the word "evolution," Ong's statement could be construed as an implication that literacy is the "fitter" of the two. At the end of the seventh chapter, however, Ong clearly states that he does not believe that literacy is necessarily "superior" to orality (175).

In his short review of Orality and Literacy for the Winter 1982 issue of Et cetera, Paul Lippert concludes "that for the study of culture and communication . . . this book will become a landmark"(402). The fact that Methuen saw fit to reprint Orality an d Literacy five times suggests that Lippert was correct. Ong's book and the work of others who investigated the differences between orality and literacy in the early 1980s inspired considerable research, much of it in areas that Ong suggests in his seven th chapter. However, fourteen years after its first publication this book and its subject matter can still provide fertile ground for research. In 1982, Ong could not have foreseen the popularity of audiobooks, or the widescale use of such technology as editable voice-mail telephone service and the synchronous text-based communication made possible by the internet. No doubt, the time is right for a sequel to Orality and Literacy, one devoted entirely to the second orality.