While reading through these chapters I really got a chance to maul over a concept that had not ever occurred to me previously. The idea that the thought of humans could be altered so much by the mediums they use to communicate in their daily lives. I have always figured that thought is though and it goes about the same for everyone. Some people are able to think more quickly and by doing so are able to approach a problem form more angles and come up with an answer to a problem first. I always assumed that given enough time everyone would eventually work their way to an answer. Ong is saying that there is a distinct break in think between those who are from primary oral cultures and those from literate cultures. This point is illustrated with a series of interviews that I found to be very convincing. I felt that the idea that many of those from oral communities saw little point in trying to describe something like a tree to someone who had never seen one. It did a really good job of showing how much these people lived in the current. There were trees where they lived and you could see them any time you please so why would you want to tell someone what a tree looked like. I could see how this break in thought process between literate cultures and oral cultures could seem like different manners of cogitation. However I think the idea is taken too far when discussing how people from non oral communities would here some of their internal thoughts as external guidance and made them more likely to believe in divine powers. I feel like there is a contestant push to feel like those who came before us were not as smart or as capable as we are now. I don’t think this is the case. Writing has given us the ability to store knowledge and pass it along in a much simpler fashion so that many individuals in literate societies now are taught a whole host of facts and figures. This allows us to look back to the achievements of the past, such as crop rotation, and minimize those achievements. Everyone knows that now so the people who “discovered it” must not have been as smart as we are now. While in actuality individual human intelligence has remained static for some time while human knowledge as a whole has grown. I would say that this growth in human knowledge has a lot to do with writing and the ability to save our knowledge efficiently from one generation to another. Before writing there a lot more that had to be remembered all the time just to survive. Now we don’t need to pass along information like which plants are poisonous or which neighbors might be likely to attack us in our sleep. We accept that that information is already part of human knowledge and somewhere along the line someone is checking current events against this store of human knowledge. As this body of human knowledge grows our time in school is spent less and less on learning knowledge and more on learning how to access the knowledge that is already stored. We start by using the same simple patterns to learn the basics that oral cultures use to pass along all information. The ABC song is a great example of this. It is used to teach kids who cannot yet read all the letters they will need. It is patterned and rhymes making it easy to fit into the natural cognitive process of humans. Once this is learned we advance to reading and then to discerning what is worth reading and finally how to use the body of human knowledge to form new knowledge and add back to the body of knowledge. It makes me wonder what the next step will be. Many science fiction books, such as Battlefield earth, suppose that the next logical step is to cut reading out of the equation. Instead of reading we will develop a method to beam information directly into our heads. It is impossible to imagine how this will affect the way we think but it will shake up the world in the same manner writing did. Those people who have devoted their lives to being the gardeners who care for the tree of human knowledge, Scholars and PhD’s, will seem to have wasted their lives. I wonder if we will seem as primitive with our writing to future peoples as past peoples and their memorization seem to us.
In addition to this I think it is extremely funny when Ong refers to your mom jokes as competitions in which "one opponent tries to outdo the other in vilifying the others mother" I think this is the best definition I have ever heard.
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