First And Second

Those who lived before any form of alphabetic writing lived in primary orality. Before history, people communicated within the realm of sound alone. This communication resulted in a way of thinking complete radical from modern humans. Without the ability to write information had to be stored in the mind. People spoke and transmitted information using very balanced, structured, rhythmic bits of language. Spoken word held very strong meaning for those of a primary culture; even so far as to make certain spoken words the law instead of having law written as it’s true form. Continuing, the cognitive functions of an oral-only culture differ because as Ong references, humans are “the navel of the world”, as sound surrounds us; whereas vision “is a dissecting sense”. Primary orality focuses on the group, the words can be heard by those close by, but as humans developed language a shift has taken towards individual thinking. Reading a novel, as opposed to listening to a bard, leaves the audience in a completely isolated experience.

Secondary orality, available through higher levels of technology: radio, television, phones, begins to shift the individual back to a group mindset. However, we now have the middleman of writing. We are told we must be “socially sensitive” through the mass media. Writing analyzes and dissects, so in turn we have written down and understood why communicating to many individuals’ gives us a group sense. The group sense is felt individually, and that threshold cannot be passed in a secondary oral culture. Ong gives the example of presidential debates. The Lincoln-Douglass debates lasted hours with raging speakers in front of large audiences, but today “candidates accommodate themselves to the psychology of the media”.

Structuring thoughts as words develops a mind based on structure. The mind of an oral speaker has a more free-flowing creative mindset. The moment has much more importance, as Ong says about sound itself, “it is… essentially evanescent”. Writing led us to keeping track of what happened, and simultaneously helps us plan our future.  Similarly, writing stifles the potency of the spoken word. Those of oral tradition see words as action itself, not as an end-point of action. Secondary orality will never resound with the participants as well as those in a primary oral culture.

Easy Access

Access to knowledge has never before been easier. Instead of searching through the annals of history for some quotation here or fact there, as Carr writes in “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, we can type our question on our keyboard and out pops an answer. Now, it seems, knowing something holds no weight. Everyone now has the capacity to know anything. Carr seems justified in questioning the intellectual ethics of the Internet, but his observations sprout mostly from anecdotes of people his own age. With the growing generation used to the saturation of knowledge they have a greater capacity to understand. As technology develops, more and more people become used to instantaneous knowledge, and they will begin to understand the relations between the pieces of knowledge they find. The relations between pieces exist as a context, and as more and more people join in the knowledge network each will come to an understanding of each other’s lifestyle and their interpretation of information. That’s why I side with Admin, who writes in “The Greatest Change In the History of Media” that individuals from many countries will be able to join each other in communication. Like the printing press, many individuals will be given an opportunity to learn about topics previously impossible for them to come into contact with. The new hoards of knowledge allow individuals to see more clearly their state and how it interacts with the world at large.

However, this new media development, the Internet, is still in its adolescence. The effects it has on society and the individual have yet to show themselves or be studied in entirety. The Internet has begun to leak into our physical world in the form of QR Codes and Facebook logos. Carr’s point must be taken with importance until we know otherwise.