On the Imperiousness of Literacy

While Ong’s questioning of the effects that the centrality of writing has on our minds and our culture is at first provocative, I think he is raising an important point that should be considered. Why are reading and writing privileged in our society, and what effect does this have? As librarians, we see great value in reading in particular, and spend much of our energy promoting its merits. I’m not suggesting that this should or will change; but I do think it is important to take a step back and understand why this exists and what it may mean. In Ong’s assertion that “Literacy is imperious,” I don’t see imperiousness as a characteristic of the term or something that is inherent in the skill of reading, but rather a reflection of the cultural privileging of this way of learning, working, and living that has become so imbedded that it may obscure our vision to other ways of thinking.

Applying Ong’s argument to Aviv’s New York Times piece “Listening to Braille” for me brings out some of the assumptions that are underlying people’s perspectives on the “illiterate” blind. I found it interesting that in Doug and Diana Brent’s study of blind people’s prose, they asked them to “write” by composing on a keyboard, a skill unfamiliar to them. They invoke Ong, but I feel, miss the idea of writing as a “technology.” To me they prove that people that haven’t had much experience writing will have difficulty writing—and perhaps even that their minds work differently that literate people. I wonder, however, how the results may have been different if they had their subjects compose their stories orally and dictate them. If the subjects then created organized, complex thoughts, would this be less valuable just because of the medium by which it was accomplished? To me the study assumes a specific set of values, and disproportionately privileges the “tool” or means of production, therefore backgrounding content or meaning. The Brents’ conclusion explicitly identifies the set of assumptions they are working from (using the term “value”) –“It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized sequence and complex thought we value in a literate society.” The examples of Laura Sloate, successful director of a Wall Street firm, and New York governor David A. Paterson may counter the idea that lack of literacy equals an inability for complex thought.

In The Children’s Machine, Seymour Papert (developer of the LOGO programming language and contributor on LEGO Mindstorms) argues that computers may offer some very meaningful ways for pre-literate (illiterate?) children to learn, create, problem solve, and interact. He questions the idea privileged in the U.S. educational system that reading is the first and most important skill to be learned, and points out just how much time teaching to read takes up of the first few years in school. He is not suggesting that reading is not important, but that it might better serve students to learn in other ways in complement to reading. This is just one example of an alternate viewpoint that may not be considered because of the privileging of literacy.

Of course, reading and writing is so embedded in most of our lives that how can we ever really distance ourselves from it enough to analyze its role? Like Plato, who records Socrates’ arguments against the written word in writing (the only way we would even know about it today), we are fully immersed in the written way of doing things. While the beginning of Ong’s article raises the questions I mention in the first paragraph, it becomes clear that he sees it as central, concluding that “Writing is a consciousness-raising and humanizing technology.” While we may come to the same conclusions, I think the process of thinking it through raises some interesting ideas.