In thirteen chapters he leads us from the earliest
oral culture through to modern media, by way of the earliest writing systems (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China); Greek writing and reading; the Roman world; writing in ritual, religion, and magic before the Middle Ages; early medieval manuscript culture in the Byzantine, Islamic, and Christian worlds; writing and reading in the Middle Ages down to the beginning of printing; printing as a new medium in the early modern period; printing and the book trade down to the eighteenth century; libraries, book-collecting, and collectors; reading and literacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; written culture as mass culture since the nineteenth century; and reading and writing in competition with film and electronic media.
But, it was, also, the difference between learning and singing songs in an
oral culture and in a literate culture.
By the year 2050, voice-in/voice-out (VIVO) talking computers incorporating multisensory, multimodal technology will make written language obsolete, and all writing and reading will be replaced by speech and multisensory content, recreating a worldwide
oral culture. This will be a positive development.
"Our
oral culture is changing rapidly, and this is why we are in the process of recording it."
She records an
oral culture on the page, sacrificing nothing in metaphor, complexity, or strong, persistent punches of reality.
Small towns rely on a much more
oral culture than urban areas.
The switch between a predominantly
oral culture and a literate one is a tricky moment.
Thus, politics is often an arena in which gut feelings derived from our innate dispositions (our heritage from
oral culture) compete with novel rules based on cultural evolution after the dawn of the literate era.
Still, culture, and especially
oral culture, also falls into time's black holes, and Dafydd only saw the universal light of day in 1789, when the first printed edition of his poetry appeared.
The faith of Israel, and eventually the early church, was formed in an
oral culture. At the great Jewish festivals, the community would come together and recite its traditions.
Henke's chapter three, for instance, "Residual Orality in Early Modern Italy and the commedia dell'arte," posits that early modern Italy was a "residually
oral culture," taking its cue from Ong's earlier article "Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style" (PMLA 80 [1965]: 145-54).