About 12 years ago I came across Walter J Ong’s writing about how oral societies thought and spoke. Non-literate people, I discovered, used words that were close to the living world. They spoke about practical situations. In contrast, since the introduction of the alphabet some 4000 years ago, and especially since the invention of printing, literate society has become fonder and fonder of logical analysis, abstract categories, theories, arguments, rules and plans.
I went on to discover a book by David Abram describing how Australian Aboriginals walked across the Outback, using stories to orient themselves but also using landmarks to trigger the stories. And I stumbled across Leonard Shlain, who argued that writing played a central role in the emergence of monotheism.
It was as if a lid had been lifted off my world. All of a sudden, I saw my own and other people’s writerly habits in a new light. I began to question how people used writing in organisational life – elaborate written agendas, minutes, proposals, strategies, wordy presentations. Even the use of flip charts started to annoy me. I developed a conviction that much of the writing I saw in organisations was getting between people. It wasn’t serving communication, creating better understanding or doing any of the things it is so good at.
What seemed to question my belief in Ong's thinking was a book called Writing Space. It had sat unread on my bookshelf for a decade but recently caught my eye again. The author, David Jay Bolter, pointed out that many scholars have criticised the “technological determinism” of Ong and his predecessor Marshall McLuhan. As Bolter put it, writing technologies (writing and printing) are not autonomous agents that can alter our culture as if from the outside, because they themselves are part of culture. They shape and are shaped by social and cultural forces. In particular, writing and printing developed alongside institutions and practices such as schools, the law and modern bureaucracy. Without writing, these institutions could not exist in their current form, but without these institutions, writing could not permeate culture in the way it has.
So, rather than saying that writing has “transformed human consciousness”, as Ong wrote and I accepted, one might say that different cultures choose to exploit writing technology for different purposes. Western culture has used it to develop and privilege abstract and bureaucratic ways of thinking.
What about all the new communication technologies, such as the web, email and mobile telephony? In the interests of brevity, I’m not going to address the immense topics of email and texting here.
Instead I will focus on the link, that revolutionary feature of web technology. Links entice us to jump about, often taking us to another page or website. We may even end up unable to find our way back to where we started. For many, the link raises doubts about the future of the book, the essay and the article, although the funny thing is, according to Bolter, that most academics, managers and non-fiction writers have stuck with linear text. Prose is still with us. To me, this is not altogether surprising, given that new technologies do not always replace old ones: the phone continues in use despite email, the novel despite film, the train despite the car, and prose despite hyperlinks and multimedia publications.
Personally, I love well-written prose by an insightful author. I like being taken by the hand and led through unfamiliar territory, whether fictional or factual. I may choose to read the text in my own order, and to skip passages that bore me, but I still value the “curatorial work” the author has done for me, selecting and ordering the material in a way that helps me get to know the subject and keeps me turning the page. (I even prefer a book made of paper to my underused Kindle, but that is a whole topic for another day.)
Long live the author! Long live the book, the essay and the thoughtful article!
Related reading
Walter J Ong. Orality and literacy. Routledge, 2002.
Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenberg galaxy. University of Toronto Press, 1062.
David Abram. The spell of the sensuous. Vintage Books, 1996.
Leonard Shlain. The alphabet versus the goddess. Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1998.
David Jay Bolter. Writing space. Georgia Institute of Technology, 2001.
Alison Donaldson. Writing in organizational life: how a technology simultaneously forms and is formed by human interaction. In Ralph Stacey (Ed.). Experiencing emergence in organizations. Routledge, 2005.