Secondary orality

Secondary orality is a concept in the work of scholar Walter J. Ong, as first described in book form with his publication of Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971: Secondary orality is a concept in the work of scholar Walter J. Ong, as first described in book form with his publication of Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971: 'Secondary orality is founded on—though it departs from—the individualized introversion of the age of writing, print, and rationalism which intervened between it and primary orality and which remains as part of us. History is deposited permanently, but not inalterably, as personality structure.'(chapter 12, paragraph 2) However, for many years before Ong started using the terms primary orality and secondary orality, he had used the expressions primarily oral culture and secondarily oral culture. Ong's most popular exposition of primary orality and secondary orality came with his book 'Orality and Literacy', published in 1982 (2nd ed. 2002), Walter J. Ong, which discussed the differences between oral and literate cultures. In this book, Ong used the phrase ‘secondary orality’, describing it as “essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print” (Ong, 1982, p. 133). According to his way of thinking, secondary orality is not primary orality, the orality of pre-literate cultures. Oral societies operated on polychronic time, with many things happening at once—socialization played a great role in the operation of these cultures, memory and memorization were of greater importance, increasing the amount of copiousness and redundancy. Oral cultures were additive rather than subordinate, closer to the human life world, and more situational and participatory than the more abstract qualities of literate cultures.