Group 2 // Ong & Kit.

by Anthony, Elio & Raed

The conflict generated between orality and literacy produce confusion on which is the better “medium”. Any being should think that one grows from the other. Orality is ancient in its form, and exists through oral transfer. It is alive, but can disappear quite easily. Only in its passing on can give it its existence. Nevertheless, through literacy (the capacity of writing) can one truly permeate the oral culture and any new culture into a more present existence. Ong speaks of literacy in comparison to death, a temporal state that alienates the human being from him or her self, but that this phenomenon is quite essential for the being. A person must be able to distance himself from any production or reproduction, just as Plato’s beings in the cave. Literacy is intricate depending on where it is being developed and still keeps it relations to orality. When speaking of common literacy, we think of a language shared by many nations, and progress to discuss the place of computable languages and mathematics as a common ground for many societies.

Kittler also shares his thoughts on this notion of death in the presence of written or printed words and discusses it is contextually when hand written or printed. One style can produce a humanized (sensualysed) persona, where as the other is mechanical and dehumanizes the text. Both speak of literacy in time and space, and discuss the power of the written word to create history, and again the notion of the word permeating itself through time.

The written word is a technology, a medium, and a tool that becomes at some point an extension to the human being. As much as it is separate from us, it comes from us and helps create a common place for us. The point where all written words become the same to all people is an utopist thought. Ong proves this point, when he describes the word being similar, and yet so different depending on its social context and time. Just as the Korean’s started of their own written language, one should think of a common place other than of literacy where people do not need to translate to understand. Kittler discusses this notion when he writes, “In computers everything becomes number: imageless, soundless, and wordless quantity.”