Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982) argues that the shift from oral to literate culture was not merely a change in communication technology but a transformation in how humans think.
Most literate people assume that oral cultures were simply literate cultures without the writing—that Homer composed like Milton but without pen and paper, that preliterate peoples reasoned like us but lacked our tools for recording conclusions. Ong demonstrates that this assumption is profoundly mistaken. Oral and literate modes represent different organisations of thought, shaped by different constraints, producing different cognitive achievements.
When thought must be retained in memory and transmitted through performance, certain structures become necessary: formulaic phrases that chunk information into memorable units, repetition that reinforces what cannot be retrieved, concrete situations that anchor what abstraction would lose. When thought can be deposited on a page and revisited, different structures become possible: subordination that articulates logical hierarchy, economy that trusts the reader to look back, abstraction that builds on established foundations.
This series traces Ong's argument through four stages: how scholarship came to recognise that oral and literate thought differ fundamentally; the characteristic features of oral consciousness revealed through fieldwork; what writing made possible that oral cultures could not achieve; and print's intensification of these effects alongside the electronic return to a new kind of orality.
The difficulty in grasping Ong's argument is that literacy has so thoroughly restructured our minds that we struggle to conceive of thought organised any other way. We read his descriptions of oral consciousness and instinctively translate them into literate categories, missing precisely what he labours to convey. The only remedy is sustained attention to evidence—to the specific findings that reveal how different oral thought actually was.