Bang a Gong, Walter Ong: After Orality and Literacy

In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong makes the startling--and since much debated--claim that writing "heightens consciousness," because it alienates the writer from the present moment. He goes on to explain: 

Alienation from a natural milieu can be and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and understand fully, we need not only proximity, but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does.

In making this claim, Ong pitted himself against no less a figure than Socrates, who set the terms for the opposition of speech and text some 2400 years prior to the publication of Orality and Literacy.

Continued at: http://criticaloptimist.blogspot.com/2010/11/bang-gong-walter-ong-after-orality-and.html