COMM 10

1. What are the differences between primary oral cultures and literary cultures?
How are they related with each other?

According to Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, a primary oral culture is a culture
with no knowledge of writing or the possibility of writing, while in a literate culture, a
person is able to learn to read and write letters. At a broad level, writing is learned. We
didn’t have the knowledge of being literate until we learned it, meanwhile, speech is
innate to humans, we just simply developed language by speaking.
During the earlier times, way before the Sumerians had written texts, people in the
primary oral culture greatly depended on recall, they couldn’t look up anything because
at that time they didn’t even have the idea of the possibility of writing down their ideas.
One keypoint that distinguishes primary oral cultures from literary culture is that it is:
Additive rather than subordinate, an example would be Genesis 1:1-5, where there were
nine introductory ‘ands’ in the original Hebrew text, produced still under the influence of
oral culture.
And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep;
and the spirit of God moved over the waters. And God said...
This text was later translated to a more compounded collection of the introductory
‘ands’.
In the age of technology, the ability to write is a skill that must be learned because
most of the knowledge you need in order to live and adapt is in written text. Literacy
gave us the convenience in accessing all this information. It is easier to grasp and
remember ideas because they are written and easier to understand. However, speech is
still equally important in language. We cannot be equipped with literacy if we haven’t
practiced orality in our own nature.

2. What does Walter Ong mean by the intersubjectivity of communication? How

does this differentiate communication from media?

Walter Ong emphasizes intersubjectivity as an operation of consciousness that

allows a person to form true communities wherein a person shares with a person
interiorly. What he actually wanted to pin down is that it is the capability of a person to
share and bring about collaborations with another person.
Ong described media similar to a pipeline system, where information is encoded
then will go through series of pipes until it gets decoded at the end of the line. This way
communication distorts the act of communication and it gives us an overview of how in
the media or medium model is described as a one way communication, where the
message is moved from sender-position to receiver-position. However, in the real world,
communication is intersubjective because human beings can communicate beyond
barriers. Ong stated that a person must somehow be inside the mind of the other person
he/she’s conversing in advance in order to enter with their message, and it should work
both ways. This is a simple example of how intersubjective communication is, it is
occuring between separate conscious minds.

3. How does the ‘media’ model of communication show chirographic (i.e. writing)
conditioning?

Ong describes that the ‘media’ model of communication show chirographic

conditioning in such a way that:

1.Chirographic cultures describes speech as more informational compared to the oral culture,
where it is more performance-oriented like doing a favor or an act.
2.the written text appears prima facie to be a one-way informational street, for no real recipient
(reader, hearer) is present when the texts come into being. But in speaking as in writing, some
recipient must be present, or there can be no text produced: so, isolated from real persons, the
writer conjures up a fictional person or persons.