Annotation II

Art Bingham,(1988),Review of Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New Accents. Ed. Terence Hawkes. (New York: Methuen, 1988).
Internet address: http://www.engl.niu.edu/wac/ong_rvw.html
This is a book review about Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy by texts. After reading this book review, we can easily understand that Ong did his best to analyze the relationship between orality and literacy. He devotes the process of language, which means “language history”. He also discusses "literate thought and expression in terms of their emergence from and relation to orality".
The debates of orality and literate have existed so far. Is really literate important than orality? Or is oral culture meaningless? From Ong’s viewpoint, these primary oral cultures are actually in the majority and that from historical standpoint writing is a relatively recent development. After hundreds of years, literacy has become a criterion to judge whether one’s literacy and ability of rhetoric are good or not. In the end of the book, Ong clearly states that he does not believe that literacy is necessarily "superior" to orality.
I think that Ong’s viewpoint is similar to mine. Orality still has its stage to stand in human beings’ history, even though literacy seems to be more essential.