Ong and Kittler

Dominic, Alex and Andrea

In the first text, orality and literacy, Walter Ong present the influence of the orality and literacy in a society. The author suggest that any new media will make an important power shift in a society. The whole text come out as an historical record of time during which the orality and literacy have played important role. Based on the reading and after group discussion, it was agreed that writing or oral language could develop strong power structure. Whether for good or bad, people in control of a language gain much influence in a society and can easily isolate other. Most of the time, these power structure become very hard to modify once they are in place as they become deeply anchored in our culture.

For the second text, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich Kittler push the first text concept and make a generalization for all medias. While not only anchored in our culture, he goes as far as saying ‘’Media determine our situation’’. For him, media are subtly feeding us without us noticing. Also, media have a lasting power of influence and become the basis for our culture as we store our memory in them. Later he suggest that medias creates new medias in a recurring loop which is for most part out of our direct control. In the second part, There is no software, he give a discrete example of this with the computer software and hardware evolution. With this statement he suggest the close relationship between computer and man in what they have become.

Whether it is for good or for bad, both text strongly make us feel that media change history itself!