Walter J. Ong

Walter J. Ong (1912-2003) was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural historian and philosopher. He is best known for exploring how the move from orality to literacy shaped culture and human consciousness. His work is considered a pioneering contribution to cultural studies and media ecology.

Born in Kansas City in 1912 to a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, he was raised in his mother's faith. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1935 and was ordained a priest in 1946. He earned a master's degree in English at Saint Louis University, where Marshall McLuhan supervised his thesis on Gerard Manley Hopkins. He completed his doctorate at Harvard in 1955 with a study of the French logician Peter Ramus, then returned to Saint Louis, where he taught for thirty years. He served as president of the Modern Language Association in 1978 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971. He died in St. Louis in 2003.

His most widely read book, Orality and Literacy (1982), starts from a simple claim: writing is a technology, learned with effort, that transforms thought. Ong separates primary orality, found in cultures that never knew writing, from secondary orality, the oral style of electronic media, which depends on writing and coexists with it. In oral cultures knowledge is kept alive through formulas, proverbs and repeated stories, while writing and print encouraged analytical thinking and a sense of the individual self. Ong stressed that these connections are complex and rarely have a single cause.

His influence reaches literary theory, education, media studies and intellectual history, and Orality and Literacy has been translated into more than a dozen languages.