Walter Ong, Part 1

From Ong’s Orality and Literacy, I found the difference in memory usage of oral and written language had both their good and bad points. In the oral society’s, remembering something is to repeat and count back to something in a loop system to refresh the memory. With writing language down, the amount of brain power to remember diminishes compared to the oral society since their reference to something occurring becomes an outside factor. Oral language is faster to translate face to face, while written can be faster is sent as a quick note. Speaking with someone who doesn’t speak the same language can definitely hinder the information being shared, and also can go for writing; some languages have their own symbols for words (i.e. Mandarin). Although I believe our society is a heavily written society, I tend to remember things that have happened on a loop; if there is time to think about nothing, there are usually old memories that have come to mind.

This can also bring forth the fact for redundancy, the same memories are reviewed over and over and little bits are lost each time; with oral societies they must have better memory to recall much more detail. Like the ancient rhetors, they used a system of mnemonics, repetition, and mental imagery to remember long speeches to recite. So if for the future and using computers now more than writing, will we lose even more memory usage? From the oral society’s to written, Ong claimed that much more thought went into writing down the words, and if we can type even faster and translate the information, will people lose more of their brain power used for memory?