Week 5 Ong Ch 1-3

   

This week we moved on to Ong.  One of the things I found interesting in the first three Ong chapters was that different cultures used writing for different purposes.

In Mesopotamia they writing was used to establish their empire and to keep affairs such as business transactions in order.  In Egypt a lot of writing was used as propaganda to promote certain rulers and people of the elite class.  In China their writing was centered around the art of divination and more mystical aspects of life.  The Phoenicians used their writing mostly to conduct business transactions and for things related to numbers.  Mayan writing was centered around time and events in history and Greek writing was mostly used to compose poetry and to vote for senate members. 

A question that Ong brought up was that history is predominantly oral so how much of it was changed? If a civilization that has writing conquers one that doesn’t they civilization with writing can obliterate the one without and change or completely erase its history.

Another argument that Ong poses that I found interesting was when he said oral literature doesn’t exist because it doesn’t have to do with writing.  My teachers have always used the term oral literature so I guess I just adopted it.  So when I read that passage in Ong it shattered a little part of my world view which was kind of scary… 

The Homeric Question and the fact that everything has an epithet attached to it in Homer’s works was also interesting.

The study that was conducted on illiterate and literate people was very intriguing.  I thought it was strange that illiterate people couldn’t recognize geometrical shapes; they assigned names to them.  For example they’d call a circle a plate.  But I guess it makes sense since they had no reason to know the names of geometrical shapes.  It didn’t have a place in their lives.

My favorite thing that we talked about was the “Everything is a Remix” video.  I always use the phrase “there are no original ideas” so that was very validating.  I’m kind of a Star Wars nerd so all the information about that was really cool. I was a little mad a George Lucas afterwards, but I guess I can forgive him.  He was inspired by some pretty interesting stuff. 

I also thought it was interesting that reading has pretty recently become a solitary activity and that people used to always read out loud.  I feel awkward enough practicing a speech alone in my room let alone walking around reading aloud to myself. 

The last thing I particularly enjoyed was the freestyle rapping.