I was very much intrigued by Honeycutt’s essay on orality and literacy; I have considered, in depth, the relationship between oral and silent reading—especially in relation to pedagogy as it has developed from antiquity. I was well aware that the primary mode of reading was indeed oral until at least the time of St. Augustine. Until the at least the fifth century A.D., reading was, in fact a communal activity. It did not belong in the realm of the private—largely because there was not much of a sense of privacy in any culture—those who had time/space for leisure and/or privacy were indeed, the aristocracy. Oral reading was a way of transmitting and reinforcing cultural norms, hence its prevalence in religious training.

But, vis a vis technology: it was in, fact, a technology that accounts for what Scribner calls “literacy as a state of grace.” During the reign of King James, catechisms and alphabetic primers converged into one book for the sake of a technological convenience—and for the sake, I believe of wedding politics and religion via the indoctrination afforded by oral recitation of transcribed doctrine—under the name of a sovereign state and monarch. This technological practice continued in the New England Primers, Webster’s Blue Back Speller, and The McGuffey and other early readers in the
U.S.

While I have read and written considerably on orality of reading, I had not considered the inverse operation of writing—likely because in educational settings, the writing always came after the reading—if it came at all. The reasons for this, if we consider literacy as ideological are of course very clear. When we are producing subjects, input is desired over output. Output, in fact, is discouraged except as imitation—hence the copybooks of early common school practices.

The emphasis on literacy (vis a vis reading) has unfortunately denigrated the affordances of orality. It is easy enough for us to understand in retrospect that if reading was once a communal public act, with its own affordances, that orality also has affordance that rely upon the collective, the communal, the public. So to overlook the use of the oral in terms of collaborative composition seems indeed counterintuitive. But again orality has been devalued because of its traditional use of vernacular—the very thing that impeded the public inscribing of documents as literacy spread beyond the Latinate erudite of Rome.

I’m not exactly sure what the author meant by “secondary orality,” but I think that as a result of this article, my thinking about Ong’s claim that “writing restructures consciousness” has changed. If what Ong meant was that during the act of writing itself, our consciousness in relation to the subject and process at hand is restructured, I do believe he is correct. Whether his claim is broader and therefore an example of technological determinism, I am not sure. But, I have often wondered about the recursiveness of the ancients writings—take Aristotle, for instance. It is often burdensome in its repetition. I always thought he was simply trying to drive home a point; I thought the restating was pedagogical. Now I wonder if it was simply the technology of having it written for him as he dictated—I’m not sure of his method of transcription.