Orality and Literacy

What Hacker News says

1. scrootJul 2025
   I recommend Havelock's Preface to Plato and Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy
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2. tombhApr 2025
   Whilst some here are critiquing this point of view due to writing's recency, there's actually some academic support for the ancient impact of "archival" if we can consider a broader definition for it, namely: linguistic works such as stories, poems, songs etc. A classic study of this is Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong_Walter_J_Orality_and_Li...

   The basic idea is that say, lyrics, are a technological innovation that "stores" information across time and space because it aides in recall.

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3. jazzyjacksonJan 2025
   Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy is an illuminating read.

   One benefit of orality is that the speaker can defend or clarify their words, whereas once you've written something, your words are liable to be misinterpreted by readers without the benefit of your rebuttal.

   Consider too that courts (in the US at least) prefer oral arguments than written, perhaps we consider it more difficult to lie in person than in writing. PhD defenses are another holdover of tradition, to be able to demonstrate your competence and not receive your credentials merely from your written materials.

   AI, I disagree it's more like oral tradition, AI is not a speaker, it has no stake in defending its claims, I would call it hyperliterate, an emulation of everything that has been written.

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4. lambdaphagyNov 2024
   The claim that the authorship was not reported for ~90 years (not 140!) is an inference based on the surviving material from a literary culture very different from our own, separated from us by 2,000 years. Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy is highly recommended to those interested in the question of how different typographical print culture can be from manuscript culture, let alone from oral culture (of which the 1st century Mediterranean was a kind of intermediate form).

   The primary argument against the traditional assignation of authorship of the Gospels is that they're not referred to by name in the Church Fathers before Irenaus (~180 AD). But by the literary standards of the ancient world, that just doesn't seem that weird to me? The early Fathers were referring to works by authors in living memory, and the prevailing bibliographical standards were somewhat lax for even further removed sources. We wouldn't claim that anyone who referred to Aristotle as "the philosopher" or Isaiah as "the prophet", as often happened, didn't know their names. Moreover, Justin Martyr (~150 CE) is often cited as evidence against named Gospels, but in the same source he refers to the Gospels collectively as "the memoirs of the Apostles", which doesn't help the case for anonymous authorship.

   The biggest problem for the anonymous theory, however, is simply that there are no manuscript witnesses to support it: all the early manuscripts have titles. So the anonymous theory has to posit:

   - The last Gospel, John, was reduced to writing about ~95 AD.

   - The Gospels circulated throughout the Mediterranean in anonymous form.

   - At some point before 180 AD, the Church decided to get its story straight and assigned names to the Gospels.

   - At that point, everyone from France to India started referring to the Gospels with their present names, without any controversies or mixups.

   - All of the earlier anonymous manuscripts were lost to history.

   I'm not saying that definitely could not have happened, just that it doesn't seem especially more plausible than the traditional account.

   I've read a suspiciously large amount of historical criticism for someone who doesn't do this for a living, thinking I would finally get to the bottom of what the New Testament was "really" about. I came away with the impression that the optimal amount of attention to pay to NT hist crit is either a lot, or zero. Every generation of hist crit somehow comes away with the conclusion that the NT is really about the issues of concern to that generation. In fact this has been going on ever since the field was founded by 19th century German Romantics, who discovered that the NT was the product of national ur-spirits expressed through folklore [!]

   Our cultural familiarity with the NT sometimes keeps us from seeing how strange a collection of documents it really is. It is perhaps the best attested collection of sources in the ancient world, yet contains a mixture of Greco-Roman biography and history, supernatural events, and mystical theology. I am not trying to persuade you of any particular view about NT scholarship so much as challenge the idea that there's anything cut and dry about it.

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5. ysofunnyJun 2024
   maybe unclear to you. may I recommend Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong. which talks about how text and writing transformed human culture

   the point (which I learned from the book) is how writting transformed human culture but did not define it, humans have a pre-literal (i.e. written) culture whose origin is literally really lost to history

   I'm saying that tech transfer can absolutely be speech driven, but I admit that text driven technological transfer is in some ways an improved version of oral-only cultural transmision (i.e. knowledge preservation)

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6. tarboreusFeb 2023
   Sure, and do you see people memorizing Oddyssey-length works and reciting them anymore? Just because you live in the world of the lost does not mean there was no loss.

   For (much) more on this, look at Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong

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