Ong Second Half

Midway through chapter four Ong discusses how even after a culture has had language for a significant amount of time they still tend to have an oral mindset. He illustrates his point with and example having to do with customs dues and the port of Sandwich. He says the dispute was settled by getting some of the oldest and most trustworthy people from the two different locations and having them recount how it had always been done as far back as they can remember. The idea that these people counted spoken word above written language seems almost incomprehensible to me. I buy most things off the internet anymore and I read what I need to know about a product before I buy it. The idea of settling a discrepancy on the word of someone else over a law or something written down seems ridiculous. One of the biggest reasons I like to buy things online is because I don’t have to go in and have a face to face meeting with a sales clerk. I feel like if I go in and look at something in person and ask questions it somehow obligates me to buy the item. In short when there is so much face to face interaction it makes me very uncomfortable. I know that person would like nothing better than for me to buy whatever it is I is looking at and so they would be more willing to bend the truth. Human character seems so much more motivated than writing. Because writing seems so un human it seems more trustworthy.
This is probably one of the thing Plato was warning about. Often times it is difficult to see the motivation behind writing quite so clearly as it can be seen in talking to someone. I think the more writing we are exposed to in our lives the easier it become to forget that at some point someone had to write it and they wrote it for a reason. There have been a lot of new stories lately about companies faking customer reviews of their products on Amazon and other major web retailers. Even knowing that there is a good chance that one of the reviews I read could be fake I still trust them more than a sales clerk. I have realized that there is no magical universal other out there writing these reviews, that these are people with something to gain at some point, and still I feel like they are more objective about it than anyone in person would be. In this respect I feel like I have come very far from humanities oral roots. I trust what I read precisely because I see it as non-human and as such freed from human flaws such as greed and malice.
While this is all true of shopping for me, when I take on the greater responsibility of shopping for solutions at work I feel like I need to speak to a human being. I work in computer securities and feel like a product is not good unless I can talk to someone who has used it, or experience it firsthand. I don’t want to read reviews but rather talk to someone. I feel like while a sales clerk at a store has no trouble lying to me to make the sale, a sales rep who is selling me software he will then have to support is much less likely to lie. His involvement goes beyond the sale. When talking about big important purchases that affect the people on the network I am securing as well as myself I want human interaction. I cannot really explain why that is but I think part of it is if something goes wrong I have someone to go back to and say “look this is not how you said it would be”. So I think even as we move forward as humans the really important problems still call for that oral interaction.