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If we couldn’t read

By The Book

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 05, 2012|By Christina Thompson

(Peter Arkle )

The other day I went to the movies with my kids. It was a public holiday so we went early, which meant that we had to sit through a lot of ads. In one of these, a manic-looking woman danced around and sang the praises of the Barnes and Noble Nook. The ad highlighted the device’s various capabilities, describing how the Nook could bring you movies, music, apps, and books, and showing an example of each in turn.

When we got to books, however, I was startled to see that what was displayed on the Nook was not type but rather illustration - from Disney’s “Winnie the Pooh,’’ if I’m not mistaken, and so not only a children’s book but a text-light version with movie and TV tie-ins. It was blindingly clear that the advertisers believed the device’s selling point to be its capacity to deliver pictures not words, or if words then in aural form, as in words spoken in a movie. Despite the common notion that the Nook is an “eReader,’’ that it can deliver printed text seemed quite beside the point.

There is much agonizing in our society over the idea that reading is on the wane. I have no way of knowing whether this is true, though I think it is clear that the volume of visual imagery in our lives is steadily increasing. I don’t actually think that there is the remotest chance that people will ever stop reading altogether, though there probably is a good chance they will stop reading the kinds of things that I (and my parents and their parents) thought one ought to read, which is perhaps what all the fuss is really about.

But the idea of not reading at all, or, to take it one step further, of living in a world in which reading does not exist, is almost inconceivable. In fact, according to some theorists, it is strictly inconceivable, that is, we cannot even imagine it because literacy itself - not individual literacy but literacy as a cultural phenomenon - has changed the way we understand the world.

This is the argument made in a fascinating book by Walter J. Ong called “Literacy and Orality,’’ first published in 1982. In it, Ong sets out a general theory of the differences between the kind of thinking that makes sense in a purely oral culture, where writing has not yet arisen or been introduced, and the kind of thinking that characterizes cultures in which literacy has taken hold.

Many of these differences have to do with categorization and abstraction. Oral thought and cultures, according to Ong, are essentially concrete and situational. Things in an oral culture are defined not in terms of the abstract or theoretical category to which they belong (i.e., tool, mammal, vegetable) but in terms of the context in which they are found or the uses to which they can be put.