“Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed (1961). Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time:… — Walter J. Ong Copy Share Image
Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when… — Walter J. Ong Copy Share Image
“Few Chinese who write can write all of the spoken Chinese words that they can understand. To become significantly learned in the Chinese writing system normally takes some twenty years. Such a script is basically time-consuming and élitist. There can be no doubt that the characters will be replaced by the roman alphabet as soon as all the people in… — Walter J. Ong Copy Share
Print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion. — Walter J. Ong Copy Share Image
“Homeric Greece and everything that philosophy after Plato stood for was, however superficially cordial and continuous, in fact deeply antagonistic, if often at the… — Walter J. Ong Copy Share Image
“Manuscripts were not easy to read, by later typographic standards, and what readers found in manuscripts they tended to commit at least somewhat to… — Walter J. Ong Copy Share Image
“The clichés in political denunciations in many low-technology, developing cultures—enemy of the people, capitalist war-mongers —that strike high literates as mindless are residual formulary… — Walter J. Ong Copy Share Image
“Indeed, the diary demands, in a way, the maximum fictionalizing of the utterer and the addressee. Writing is always a kind of imitation talking,… — Walter J. Ong Copy Share Image
“Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects, as… — Walter J. Ong Copy Share Image
