Secondary orality

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Walter J. Ong presented the dichotomy between oral and literate cultures in his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, published in 1982. In this book, he coined the phrase ‘secondary orality’, describing it as “essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print” (Ong, 1982, p.136)^[1]. Oral societies operated on polychronic time, with many things happening at once—socialization played a great role in the operation of these cultures, memory and memorization were of greater importance, increasing the amount of copiousness and redundancy. Oral cultures were additive rather than subordinate, closer to the human life world, and more situational and participatory than the more abstract qualities of literate cultures.

In this way, secondary orality is a type of interpersonal communication that is neither classically oral nor literate, and has been made possible entirely through modern communication technologies. This communication is now instantaneous, so despite its use of the written word, it allows for transactions to be nearly as cyclical as orality; thoughts and ideas are repeated and revisited several times, instead of simply being stated once, as in literacy.

The principle new technologies that have made secondary orality possible include instant messaging, texting over mobile phones, and the development of what could be considered a new dialect of language: chat room slang. Whether or not the prevalence of these communication technologies impacts the literate tendencies of our culture has yet to be seen.

[edit] Further reading

Walter J. Ong (1971). "The Literate Orality of Popular Culture", Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. The term was coined in this essay.
Walter J. Ong (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen. Ong's major monograph on the subject.