Walter J. Ong

Walter Jackson Ong (November 30, 1912 to August 12, 2003) was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian, and philosopher whose scholarship shaped how education thinks about the shift from oral to literate culture. Ong argued that writing is a technology, like fire or the steam engine, that reshapes societies and the very structure of thought when it is introduced into an oral culture, and he distinguished primary oral cultures from cultures with craft literacy and from societies in a transitional state of residual orality. His most influential book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, published in 1982, traced how the shift from sound to sight changes thought itself, with consequences for how curricula treat reading, writing and rhetoric. Earlier works including Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue in 1958 and The Presence of the Word in 1967 laid groundwork for the field of media ecology. Ong served as elected president of the Modern Language Association in 1978 and died on August 12, 2003.