Ong 1

Oral based cultures and writing based cultures functions on completely different terms. First of all he discusses how oral cultures generally have shorter memory spans. For example, if a person from an oral culture tells a story or an experience, he would have to tell it all the way through and not be interrupted. And if he was interrupted, then he would have to start his story all over again from the very beginning. This is an example of how oral cultures functions differently. Language as a technology began developing because of the need for longer memory spans. This is because of studies that suggest that written cultures have evolved in a sense to have longer memory spans than oral cultures because writing down information helps with remembering information. Also now in written cultures we can record history whereas in oral cultures they would have to pass the stories down orally and only orally from one generation to the next. This means that there can be more room for error in these stories because someone may not remember it 100% correctly. In written cultures recorded history have a sense of permanence and not anyone can make up or change these so easily. Although there are people who at first believed that writing will destroy history, but now that we see that this will actually help it.