Oral culture

Each generation:
1) Passes on its material resources to next generation
2) Passes on standardized ways of acting (through verbal means and demonstration/imitation)
3) Passes on a range of meanings and attitudes communicated through verbal knowledge and symbols (ideas of space and time, generalized goals and aspirations through genealogies, sacred tales)
4) Remembers and forgets according to what suits the present situation (Goody and Watt 306).

“Language helps us make sense of our world: it creates and separates ‘knower’ and ‘known’, ‘subject’ and ‘object’. ‘We know what a thing is by cutting it off from other things” (Ong, Interfaces of the world, 1977).

“That outering or uttering of sense which is language and speech is a tool which ‘made it possible for man to accumulate experience and knowledge in a form that made easy transmission and maximum use possible’” (Leslie A. White, The Science of Culture, 240, quoted in the Gutenberg Galaxy 5).

“It was language that enabled man to achieve a form of social organisation whose range and complexity was different in kind from that of animals: whereas the social organisation of animals was mainly instinctive and genetically transmitted, that of man was largely learned and transmitted verbally through the cultural heritage.” (Jack Goody and Ian Watt. “The Consequences of Literacy“).

[P]re-literate societies live in a near-total present as they have little perception of the past except in terms of the present. They cannot check. “Myth and history merge into one” (Goody & Watt 311).

Writing
“Because we have by today so deeply interiorized writing, made it so much a part of ourselves … we find it difficult to consider writing to be a technology as we commonly assume printing and the computer to be” (Ong, 1982, 136).

“[W]riting … implies a complete change in the relation of man’s waking-consciousness, in that it liberates it from the tyranny of the present … the activity of writing and reading is infinitely more abstract than that of speaking and hearing” (Oswald Spengler quoted in Goody and Watt, 331).

“All thought, including that in primary oral cultures, is to some degree analytic in that it breaks down material in various components, but “abstractly sequential, classificatory, explanatory examination of phenomena or of stated truths is impossible without writing and reading” (Ong, 1982, 8).

“Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. Such transformations can be uplifting. Writing heightens consciousness” (Ong, S.J., Orality and Literacy, 81).

“Any technology tends to create a new human environment. Script and papyrus created the social environment we think of in connection with the empires of the ancient world … Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike” (McLuhan, Galaxy, back of title page)

Bibliography
Goody, Jack and Ian Watt. “The Consequences of Literacy” (Online) 1963.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. 1962.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 1982.