Orality

Orality is thought and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy (especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population. The study of orality is closely allied to the study of oral tradition. However, it has broader implications, implicitly touching every aspect of the economics, politics, institutional development, and human development of oral societies. The study of orality has important implications for international development, especially as it relates to the goal of eradicating poverty, as well as to the process of globalization.

In his later publications Walter J. Ong, a key scholar in this field, distinguishes between two forms of orality: ‘primary orality’ and ‘secondary orality’. In his earlier publications Ong uses the terms 'primarily oral culture' and 'secondarily oral culture'. He works with the contrast of primary orality and secondary orality as the way to establish what one thing is by indicating what it is not: Secondary orality is not primary orality. In addition, he refers to 'oral residue' and 'residually oral cultures'. Following his example in coining the terms primary orality and secondary orality, we can refer to residual orality.

In his 1982 book mentioned above (2nd ed. 2002), Ong sums up his own work over the previous three decades as well as the work of numerous other scholars. With regard to oral tradition and primary orality he draws on pioneering work by Milman Parry, Albert B. Lord, and Eric A. Havelock. Marshall McLuhan was among the first to fully appreciate the significance of the Ong's earlier work about print culture and the written and printed word as a technology. In his work The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan quotes and discusses works by Ong in the 1950s regarding print culture on pages 104, 129, 146, 159–60, 162–63, 168, 174–76. But using his own examples to amplify Ong's thought, McLuhan shows how each stage in the development of this technology throughout the history of communication – from the invention of speech (primary orality), to pictograms, to the phonetic alphabet, to typography, to the electronic communications of today – restructures human consciousness, profoundly changing not only the frontiers of human possibility, but even the frontiers it is possible for humans to imagine.

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