(Brief Thoughts On) Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought

In Walter Ong’s 1986 essay “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” Ong reflects on what he refers to as the “imperious,” nature of written literacy and how it separates the knower from the known.  He explains that society is bound to writing, that “we have interiorized the technology of writing”(19) and, as such, writing has unwittingly adopted the unique ability to authoritatively separate the literate from the illiterate. Ong’s most powerful idea in the essay comes in describing the paradox created through reducing words to space, explicating the meaninglessness of physical writings: “written text, for all its permanence, means nothing . . . except in relationship to the spoken word”(23).  Simply put, writing becomes meaningless without sound because “all verbal expression, whether put into writing, print, or the computer, is ineluctably bound to sound forever”(23).  This ties into Gregory Ulmer’s argument that technology ushers in epochs and forces change in communication by subsuming previous ones — orality, the ancient epoch, was subsumed by literacy which will, according to Ulmer, be absorbed by electracy.