Florence Margaret Paisey

Professor Treharne

English 5933

Ong, Walter. "Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought." In Literacy: A

Critical Sourcebook. Edited by Ellen Cushman, et al. Boston, MA: Bedford/St.

Martin's, 2001, pp. 19-31.

On Ong: Writing and Restructuring Thought

Ong claims that humans have internally integrated the technologies of writing,

printing, and electronics, yet each technology is an external agency that fundamentally

compromises man’s holistic experience. Such technologies extend human capabilities,

but each is also artificial, inhuman and exterior. These inventions or manufactured

products have accelerated the evolution of analytical thought, while also impinging on

innate human oral-aural dimensions that are momentous and distinguish humans. As a

result, humans become alienated and separated from their primal understanding.

Literacy, as these technologies require, may facilitate the development of

consciousness, but they are, nonetheless, artificial and, ultimately, distort what it means

to be human. Ong maintains that technologically sophisticated cultures have interiorized

literacy and the use of these technologies to the extent that their presence is no longer

recognized as intrusive. Rather, these technologies—writing, printing and electronics—

have become indistinguishable from direct experience; humans are unaware of how

literacy affects their elemental lives. Within high-tech cultures, these external

technologies are viewed as articulators of the sense or truth of human life, though the

truths of life reach far deeper than any written word, devoid of its context, can impart.

2

Ong believes that without an understanding of noetic acuity – before the imposition of

writing – one cannot establish a realistic perspective on writing or literacy and its

consequences on humans, their behavior and innate perception. Ong enumerates thirteen

ways in which writing separates and divides humans from themselves, including how the

objectivity inherent in textual literacy removes humans from their most profound or

weightiest sense of being and existence.