Walter J. Ong
Based on Wikipedia: Walter J. Ong
Before you learned to read, you were a different kind of person. Not less intelligent, not less capable of complex thought, but fundamentally different in how your mind worked. You lived in a world of sound and memory, where knowledge was something that happened between people, not something that sat quietly on a shelf waiting to be consulted. This transformation—what it means for a human being to cross from the spoken world into the written one—consumed the life's work of a Jesuit priest from Kansas City named Walter Ong.
Ong spent decades exploring a question that seems obvious only until you actually think about it: What did writing do to us?
Not what did writing allow us to record, or preserve, or communicate. What did it do to the way we think? To who we are? The answer, he argued, was everything.
The Technology We Forgot Was a Technology
Writing is so fundamental to modern life that we've forgotten it was invented. We treat literacy like breathing—something natural and inevitable rather than a tool humans created roughly five thousand years ago. But Ong insisted on calling writing what it is: a technology, just like fire or the steam engine or the printing press.
This framing matters. Technologies don't just help us do things we were already doing. They change what's possible. They reshape how we think about problems. Eventually, they reshape how we think, period.
Consider fire. Cooking food externally meant our ancestors could redirect metabolic energy away from digestion and toward bigger brains. The technology changed our bodies. Writing, Ong argued, changed our minds just as profoundly.
In what Ong called "primary oral cultures"—societies that have never encountered writing at all—knowledge works differently than we imagine. There's no encyclopedia to consult, no library to visit, no notes to review. Everything you know must be actively held in living memory, either your own or someone else's in your community. This constraint shapes absolutely everything about how oral cultures preserve and transmit information.
How Memory Becomes Culture
When your culture has no way to write anything down, you need strategies for remembering things that matter. These strategies explain features of ancient societies that might otherwise seem merely decorative or quaint.
Think of proverbs. "A stitch in time saves nine." "The early bird catches the worm." These aren't just folk wisdom—they're memory technology. Compressed packages of hard-won knowledge, shaped into forms that stick in the mind and pass easily from mouth to ear to mouth again. Oral cultures rely heavily on such condensed formulas because memorable phrases survive across generations in a way that ordinary conversation doesn't.
Or consider epic poetry. Why did the ancient Greeks compose enormous poems about Odysseus and Achilles? Partly because the rhythmic, repetitive structure of verse makes content easier to memorize and perform. The fixed epithets—"swift-footed Achilles," "wine-dark sea," "rosy-fingered dawn"—aren't just poetic flourishes. They're cognitive anchors that help performers navigate thousands of lines from memory while improvising within traditional structures.
The same logic explains stylized heroes. In oral tradition, characters tend toward extremes: the wise counselor Nestor, the cunning Odysseus, the mighty Achilles. Nuanced psychological portraits are harder to remember and retell than bold archetypes. The flatness of mythological characters isn't a failure of ancient storytelling sophistication—it's an adaptation to the constraints of oral transmission.
What Writing Made Possible (and Impossible)
Writing breaks these constraints entirely.
Once you can store information outside human memory, you no longer need proverbs to encode practical wisdom. You can write a manual. You no longer need epic poetry to preserve cultural history. You can write chronicles. You no longer need simplified character types. A writer can craft intricate personalities knowing the reader can flip back a few pages to recall what they'd forgotten.
But here's the thing Ong kept emphasizing: these new capabilities don't just add to what humans could already do. They fundamentally rewire how literate people think.
Oral cultures are "aggregative"—they build knowledge through accumulation of traditional elements, each reinforced by repetition across generations. Literate cultures become "analytic"—able to break complex wholes into parts, examine each piece in isolation, manipulate components abstractly. The very concept of analysis—etymologically, "loosening up"—depends on the kind of fixed text you can scrutinize and dissect.
Oral cultures are necessarily conservative. Innovation threatens survival. If someone improves a story or updates a proverb, the original might be lost forever. There's no backup. But literate cultures can afford experimentation because the old versions remain safely inscribed.
Perhaps most importantly, Ong believed that writing made possible a new kind of interior life. In oral cultures, thinking happens through external dialogue—with other people, with tradition, with the communal memory of the group. Writing enables private thought. You can argue with yourself on the page. You can develop ideas in isolation over years. The introspective individual, the self-contained consciousness examining its own processes—this is a creation of literacy.
The Scholar's Path
Walter Jackson Ong was born in 1912 in Kansas City, Missouri. He graduated from Rockhurst High School, earned a bachelor's degree in Latin from Rockhurst College, and worked in printing and publishing before entering the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—in 1935. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1946.
For his master's thesis at Saint Louis University in 1940, Ong studied the innovative rhythms in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, supervised by a young Canadian professor named Marshall McLuhan. This mentorship would prove formative, though not quite in the way one might expect.
McLuhan—who would later become famous for phrases like "the medium is the message" and "the global village"—apparently had little interest in Hopkins. He steered his student instead toward a sixteenth-century French logician named Peter Ramus, an obscure figure whose influence on education had been vast but largely forgotten.
Ong took the suggestion and ran with it. For his doctoral work at Harvard, supervised by the influential American intellectual historian Perry Miller, Ong devoted years to tracking down more than 750 volumes of Ramist writings (mostly in Latin) across more than one hundred European libraries. The resulting dissertation, published as "Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue" in 1958, established Ong's scholarly reputation and introduced themes he would pursue for the rest of his career.
The Ramus Revelation
Peter Ramus (1515–1572) is not a name most people recognize today. But his approach to education shaped Western schooling for centuries, and Ong saw in Ramism a key transitional moment in the shift from oral to literate modes of thought.
Classical education, inherited from ancient Greece and Rome, was fundamentally dialogical. Learning happened through debate, through question and answer, through the living exchange of speech. Knowledge was something you performed—rhetoric, the art of persuasion, stood at the center of the curriculum.
Ramus proposed something different. He developed a "method" for organizing any subject into hierarchical diagrams—branching trees that divided topics into subtopics into sub-subtopics, arranging all knowledge into tidy visual schemas. His textbooks were wildly popular across Protestant Europe, used in countless schools for generations.
This might seem like mere pedagogical technique. But Ong saw something more profound at work. Ramist method transformed knowledge from something spoken and enacted into something visualized and arranged. The branching diagram replaced the dialogical exchange. The spatially organized textbook replaced the rhetorical contest.
Ong called this the "spatialization" and "quantification" of thought. Ideas that had lived in time—unfolding through the duration of speech—became objects arranged in space on the printed page. This shift, he argued, was connected to the emergence of modern science with its emphasis on visual observation, systematic classification, and mathematical abstraction.
The schoolroom, in the Ramist conception, became "the doorway to reality, and indeed the only doorway." Knowledge was no longer something you absorbed through living participation in a community. It was something administered through a curriculum, a word that literally means "a running," a course to be completed.
From Print to Electronics
Ong returned to Saint Louis University in 1954 and taught there for the next thirty years. His career accumulated honors: the French government made him a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes académiques for his Ramus scholarship in 1963. He served on President Lyndon Johnson's White House Task Force on Education. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1978, he became president of the Modern Language Association, a major professional recognition.
But his most lasting contribution was a series of books developing his theory of orality and literacy. "The Presence of the Word" appeared in 1967, based on lectures delivered at Yale. "Fighting for Life," exploring competition and consciousness, came from his 1979 Cornell lectures. And in 1982, he published his most widely read work: "Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word."
This last book synthesized decades of thinking into an accessible statement of Ong's core ideas. It drew heavily on the work of classicist Eric Havelock, who had argued that ancient Greek philosophy emerged precisely from the tension of a society transitioning from oral to literate culture—that Plato's famous hostility to poets reflected the collision between old oral ways of knowing and the new analytical possibilities of alphabetic writing.
Ong extended this analysis forward through history. The invention of printing intensified the effects of writing, fixing texts more permanently and distributing them more widely. Print culture, he argued, fostered the modern sense of individual authorship, the notion of intellectual property, and the interiorized self-consciousness we now take for granted.
But Ong didn't stop with print. He was deeply interested in what he called "secondary orality"—the new world of sound created by telephones, radio, and television. These electronic media reintroduced voice and sound into cultures long dominated by print, but they did so atop the literate foundation rather than replacing it. The person watching TV is not an oral culture person. They bring all their literate mental habits to the experience. Secondary orality is something genuinely new, a complex layering of technological consciousness.
The Audience That Isn't There
One of Ong's most influential essays bore the memorable title "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction." Published in 1975, it made a deceptively simple observation with far-reaching implications.
When you speak to someone, they're there. You can see their reactions, adjust your tone, respond to their confusion or engagement. The audience is real and present and participates in shaping what you say.
When you write, the audience is absent. You imagine readers, project what they might know or need, construct a fictional version of who will eventually encounter your words. And readers, for their part, must adopt whatever role the text assigns them—they must "fictionalize" themselves into the assumed audience the writer imagined.
This might seem like a small observation about rhetoric. But Ong saw it as revealing something fundamental about how writing works. Every piece of writing presupposes an audience that doesn't yet exist and may never exist in the form imagined. The entire communicative situation is built on mutual fictions. And this distinguishes writing absolutely from speech, where the feedback loop is immediate and unavoidable.
Residual Orality and the Spectrum of Literacy
Ong was careful not to present orality and literacy as a simple binary. Cultures don't flip a switch from oral to literate. They exist along a continuum, with different groups and individuals at different points.
He distinguished several positions. Primary oral cultures have never encountered writing at all—these are increasingly rare in the modern world but still exist. Craft literacy describes societies where reading and writing are specialized skills possessed by a professional class (scribes, priests) while most people remain oral. Residual orality describes the more common situation where literacy is widespread but oral habits of thought persist, especially among those whose education was limited.
These distinctions matter because they help explain otherwise puzzling cultural phenomena. Why did medieval Europeans produce so many texts meant to be read aloud? Why did nineteenth-century Americans flock to hours-long oratorical performances that would seem unbearable today? Why do modern legal documents retain ritualistic verbal formulas—"Whereas," "party of the first part"—that sound strange to contemporary ears? In each case, traces of oral culture persist within ostensibly literate societies.
Even today, most people experience a mix of oral and literate modes. We absorb information through podcasts and videos as well as books and articles. We learn through conversation as well as reading. The pure literate mind—formed entirely by solitary interaction with printed text—may never have actually existed, and certainly doesn't describe most contemporary experience.
The Priest and the Professor
Ong was both a Jesuit priest and an academic scholar, and these identities informed each other throughout his career. His interest in "the Word" had obvious theological resonance. Christianity is a religion founded on logos—the Word that was with God and was God, according to the Gospel of John. The incarnation of meaning in speech, and the preservation of sacred words in written scripture, were not abstract theoretical concerns for Ong but matters of spiritual urgency.
He wrote on explicitly Catholic topics—"Frontiers in American Catholicism" appeared in 1957, "American Catholic Crossroads" in 1959—as well as on the history of Western education, which for centuries was primarily a religious enterprise. The Jesuits themselves were famous educators, and Ong's scholarly investigations of pedagogy connected directly to his vocation.
But he never reduced his academic work to religious apologetics. His major contributions were recognized by secular scholarly institutions, and "Orality and Literacy" has been translated into at least eleven languages and continues to influence fields from literary theory to anthropology to media studies. The work stands on its own merits.
Critics and Complications
No scholar who makes large claims escapes criticism, and Ong's ideas have been challenged on various grounds.
The British literary critic Frank Kermode raised objections in a 1968 review. Howard Hotson of Oxford argued that Ong misunderstood certain aspects of Peter Ramus's actual thought. James Wimsatt took issue with Ong's interpretation of Hopkins's poetry—the very topic of his original master's thesis.
More broadly, some scholars have questioned whether the oral/literate distinction carries quite the weight Ong placed on it. Different writing systems may have different cognitive effects; alphabetic literacy isn't the same as Chinese character literacy or cuneiform. The timing and social context of how literacy spreads matters enormously. Sweeping claims about what "literacy" does to "the mind" may obscure as much as they reveal.
There's also the question of whether Ong romanticized oral cultures or implicitly denigrated them as "primitive." He tried to avoid this, insisting that oral modes of thought are sophisticated and valuable in their own right, not merely deficient versions of literacy. But the language of "evolution" from orality to literacy can suggest a developmental narrative where writing represents progress beyond more limited earlier stages.
Ong anticipated some of these critiques. He explicitly rejected the idea that his work was about strict causation—that orality "causes" certain cultural features while literacy "causes" others. He preferred to describe relationships and correlations, patterns that tend to appear together without claiming simple determinism. Culture is too complex for single-factor explanations.
A Continuing Conversation
Walter Ong died in 2003 in St. Louis at age ninety. He left behind a substantial body of work that continues to generate discussion. Several Festschriften—collections of essays honoring a scholar—have been published in his name. His collected papers are housed at Saint Louis University, and a digital archive preserves materials for future researchers.
The questions he raised have only grown more urgent. We live in an era of transforming media. The internet combines features of print and speech in unprecedented ways. Social media creates public writing that feels like conversation. Podcasts and audiobooks return information to the voice. Video dominates attention in ways that neither print nor television predicted. Artificial intelligence generates text without human authors and synthesizes speech without human speakers.
What are all these technologies doing to us? How are they reshaping consciousness and culture? What new hybrid modes of thought are emerging from the collision of old and new media?
These are Ong's questions, applied to circumstances he didn't live to see. They don't have easy answers. But he provided a framework for thinking about them—an insistence that the tools we use to communicate don't just transmit our thoughts but shape the thoughts we're capable of having.
You are reading these words on a screen or hearing them through speakers. Either way, you are engaging in a technologically mediated act of communication that Ong would have found endlessly fascinating. The very fact that you can reflect on this—that you can think about thinking, examine your own consciousness as though from the outside—is itself, he would have argued, a consequence of literacy. The interior self that does the examining was built by centuries of reading and writing.
We swim in an ocean of words without seeing the water. Ong spent his life trying to make that water visible.