In his essay, Walter J, Ong discusses the change from spoken language to written language and how this shift has affected society. In his novel, William Gibson writes about multiple technologies involved in how humanity communicates. Both very focused on languages and how we as people get our messages across to one another. There are some differences, however, in they way they present these thoughts. While Ong discusses the changes of language and how language is presented overtime, Gibson shows how language is communicated through a lot of advanced technologies. For example, in Gibson’s novel, the main character Chase uses advanced technology to understand written language. Case was able to ask his computer to read documents to him instead of reading and understanding them himself which is what a lot of modern day people would do. This allows the language to be processed more immediately and in a much easier way. In Ong’s essay he once writes, “Hearing rather than sight had dominated the older noetic world in significant ways, even long after writing was deeply interiorized”. Case choosing to listen to the documents on his computer rather than read them on his own supports the claim Ong is making in this quote. Hearing is shown to be a more popular choice when communicating.
Throughout his entire essay, Ong is basically giving a timeline of how oral and written speech and the way they are presented have been transforming. This is a change from Gibson where all of his language is being presented in an advanced and sometimes futuristic way. This supports Ong’s claim that the way we communicate is changing overtime because the technologies discussed in Gibson’s novel are a huge juxtaposition from the ones discussed in the beginning of Ong’s timeline. This only shows that technology is evolving everyday as we figure out the new and preferred ways we want to communicate our languages as a society.
While rereading pages 79-81 in Gibson’s novel came to realize that people do have a preferred way of communicating or understanding certain languages which is also a message someone could interpret in Ong’s essay. The reasons why we change the way we communicate oral and writtin speech is because we find easier and better ways to do so. The technology in Gibson’s novel is so advanced because they essentially make th life of the user better. They inventions created in Ong’s essay were created for the exact same reason. Although both readins have very different technologies mentioned, they still support each other’s claims in their own ways.
Sources:
Walter Ong, “Print, Space, Closure”, 1912
William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984
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