By reading the first four chapters of the book Orality & Literacy by Walter J. Ong, i could recognize some differences between primal oral cultures and literate cultures, and how the first one emerged from the second.

Here are some notable points I found about the Oral Culture:

• The resources of only a few thousand words, and its users will have virtually no knowledge of the real semantic history of any of these words.
• They learn great deal and possess and practice great wisdom, but they do not ‘study’
• Homer was not literate and that it was the power of memory that enabled him to produce this poetry.
• Knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost: fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential for wisdom and effective administration.
• Lack of introspectivity, of analytic prowess, of concern with the will as such, of a sense of difference between past and future.
• They have no focus and no trace (visual metaphor). They are occurrences, events.
• No sense of  name as a tag, for they have no idea of a name as something that                          can be seen.
• Nothing outside the thinker, no text, to enable him or her to produce the same line of thought again, or even to verify it.
• An interlocutor is virtually essential. Tied to communication
• Rhythm aids recall
• Vanishes as soon as it is uttered
• Observation and practice. Situational thinking.
• Violance, good and evil, villains and heroes. Concrete Objects
• Unite people in groups
• Sound: unifying sense.
• The letter kills the spirit – Plato: inhuman. Can’t get explanation of a text

Here are some notable points I found the Literate Culture:

• The spoken word still resides and live in it
• Abstractly sequential, classificatory, explanatory examination of  phenomena or of stated truths is impossible without writing and reading
• Though words are grounded in oral speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever.
• Establishes in the text a ‘line’ of continuity outside the thinker
• Interior crises, away from purely exterior crises
• Personally interiorized
• Writing and reading are solitary activities that throw psyche back on itself
• Antihero
• Detached from its author
• Writing: technology – interior transformations of consciousness
• Represent sound itself as a thing, transforming the evanescent world of  sound to the quiescent, quasi-permanent world of space.
• Secret and magic power
• Thing-like. Immobilized in visual space
• Foresee circumspectly all possible meanings a statement may have