Walter J. Ong: Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982–)

This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures offering a very clear account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology.

In the course of his study, Walter J. Ong offers fascinating insights into oral genres across the globe and through time, and examines the rise of abstract philosophical and scientific thinking. He considers the impact of orality-literacy studies not only on literary criticism and theory but on our very understanding of what it is to be a human being, conscious of self and other.

First published in 1982 by Methuen & Co. Ltd
Publisher Routledge, 2002
New Accents series
ISBN 0415281296, 9780415281294
204 pages

Publisher
Google books

PDF (1982/2002, updated on 2014-11-23)

Roy Ascott (ed.): Engineering Nature: Art & Consciousness in the Post-Biological Era (2006)

This third volume in the Consciousness Reframed series, documenting the very latest artistic and theoretical research in new media and telematics including aspects of artificial life, robotics, technoetics, performance, computer music and intelligent architecture. The contributions to this volume represent the work produced at conferences and in journals which are only now emerging into more accessible literature. With over fifty highly respected practitioners and theorists in art and science contributing, there is a stimulating diversity of approach and a rich background of knowledge.

Publisher Intellect Books, 2006
Consciousness Reframed Series
ISBN 184150128X, 9781841501284
333 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)

Vilém Flusser: Does Writing Have a Future? (1987/2011)

“In Does Writing Have a Future?, a remarkably perceptive work first published in German in 1987, Vilém Flusser asks what will happen to thought and communication as written communication gives way, inevitably, to digital expression. In his introduction, Flusser proposes that writing does not, in fact, have a future because everything that is now conveyed in writing—and much that cannot be—can be recorded and transmitted by other means.

Confirming Flusser’s status as a theorist of new media in the same rank as Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Friedrich Kittler, the balance of this book teases out the nuances of these developments. To find a common denominator among texts and practices that span millennia, Flusser looks back to the earliest forms of writing and forward to the digitization of texts now under way. For Flusser, writing—despite its limitations when compared to digital media—underpins historical consciousness, the concept of progress, and the nature of critical inquiry. While the text as a cultural form may ultimately become superfluous, he argues, the art of writing will not so much disappear but rather evolve into new kinds of thought and expression.”

Originally published in German in 1987 as Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft?, Göttingen.
Translated by Nancy Ann Roth
Introduction by Mark Poster
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Volume 33 of Electronic Mediations
ISBN 0816670234, 9780816670239
208 pages

Review: Bob Hanke (Int’l J of Communication)

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-2-29)