Icts in Contexts: Reporting Research from Researching Researchers' Reports

Orality and literacy Orality and literacy Orality and literacy Orality and literacy In Walter Ong's classic study Orality and Literacy, he shows how writing is not just a tool but a way of life. I suppose the primary aim of the book is to describe the nature of oral societies, but I have always seen it as the story of how we – in our modern literal societies-have become what we are. I have continued to find it strangely compelling, probably because I have always been – like many academics, I imagine – a literary person, in the sense that I have a very close relationships with written texts. After all, we spend most of our working lives consuming or constructing texts. I think my fascination with Ong's book has to do with the way it describes an aspect of me that is at once incredibly intimate – the solitude of experiencing a novel you love, or a theory you can't get your head around – and strangely public – books being, after all, accessible to most people in our society. The interesting thing about Ong is that he is not content to point to our literal practices; he describes the literal mindset, and shows how our being accustomed to text to some degree explains what kind of people we are 1. He does so by showing how incredibly different we are from people who do not relate to texts. In a society where information can only be stored in the heads of people, and only be exchanged in concrete interactional situations, information is simply something entirely different. It is so fragile, can so easily be lost or distorted, that you simply cannot take it for granted. It is a mode of action rather than a description of