On the difficulty of seeing things differently: Note on Rereading Ong
I've have, yet again, been rereading Ong's lecture “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” in preparation for teaching it tomorrow. I like Ong, and despite understanding and accepting many criticisms of the Great Leap theory from New Literacy theorists (never got into Derrida enough to assimilate him effectively), there's still something about the basic ideas that I find compelling. But that's not what this post is about.
I just had a moment when I finally “got” the idea that writing is a technology just like the printing press or computers. It's not that I didn't get this on some level before, but I had always felt it as somehow different, that writing was somehow more fundamental and that as a technology it was different in kind from these others. In other words, it seemed an equivocation to call writing and the printing press technologies; the definition of “technology” seemed somehow to change when addressing one or the other. And to point out that they were each technologies because each one relied on tools seemed somehow to mistake accident for substance (as so many definitional arguments do.)
But I just had a moment where this idea I've been mulling over for years really did sink in. Maybe I'm just dense. But it's helpful, as a teacher, to recognize how hard it can be to think differently, how difficult it can be to assimilate a new perspective, and why it's valuable to do that work.
I just had a moment when I finally “got” the idea that writing is a technology just like the printing press or computers. It's not that I didn't get this on some level before, but I had always felt it as somehow different, that writing was somehow more fundamental and that as a technology it was different in kind from these others. In other words, it seemed an equivocation to call writing and the printing press technologies; the definition of “technology” seemed somehow to change when addressing one or the other. And to point out that they were each technologies because each one relied on tools seemed somehow to mistake accident for substance (as so many definitional arguments do.)
But I just had a moment where this idea I've been mulling over for years really did sink in. Maybe I'm just dense. But it's helpful, as a teacher, to recognize how hard it can be to think differently, how difficult it can be to assimilate a new perspective, and why it's valuable to do that work.
posted by Erasmus | 6:48 PM
2 Comments:
I had the same conflict reading Ong, and now I'm also doing a project on the development and impact of the rotary printing press. It's strange to think of writing as a technology.
It was until I read Ong's piece for your Writing and Media course that I thought of writing as a technology. Ong asserts that it's influence is so deeply embedded in our way of thinking that it would require great effort to even consider the ways in which it structures the way we think. This then made me wonder how my cousin who has dyslexia thinks in terms of language and writing. She's a fine arts student and I suppose that art has filled that void that writing could never fill and in a way, it makes me wonder what kind of person would I be if I couldn't read. Re-reading Ong's piece a few days ago forced me to think of writing as a technology in ways that I never considered before.
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