Ong on Oral v. Written [blogging the self]

The question is, "How does blogging [that fluid reading/writing activity] change our sense of ourselves?"restructures human consciousness. In this history of literacy, the spoken word is something that wells up directly from the human unconscious, whereas written language is expressed through artificial (i.e. human-made) frameworks, systems of "consciously contrived, articulable rules." These rules (and their runes) create a scaffold for the brain, which, now able to engage with complex ideas in contemplative solitude as opposed to interlocution, begins to conceive of itself as an individual entity rather than as part of a collective. Literate cultures are thus cognitively different than oral ones...

[True, these arguments do smack of the same theories that had everyone worked up ten years ago. Remember "interactivity" and the death of the "Author"?]

"Ong called the invention of writing the "technologizing of the word," a process that fundamentally

"What's so interesting here, is that it seems that the age of networked reading and writing promises to get us much closer to one of the crucial aspects of oral culture — the sense that the story teller/author and the audience/reader are joined together in a collective enterprise where the actions of each will have a direct and noticeable impact on the other.

via futureofthebook