Orality

Orality is thought and verbal expression in societies, as distinct from the technologies of literacy, especially writing and print, and the study of orality is closely allied to the study of oral tradition. The term describes, in a generalized way, the structures of consciousness found in cultures that do not use, or use only minimally, the technologies of writing. The literary scholar Walter J. Ong's work was foundational to the study of orality, and later distinguished primary orality, thought and expression untouched by writing or print, from secondary orality, an oral culture shaped by the written and printed word, such as a newscaster reading a report on television; Ong also named residual orality, the legacy of a predominantly oral culture carried into written form, as in Plato's use of dialogue as a philosophical device.