Orality

Orality is thought and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy (especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population.

[3] 'Primary orality' refers to thought and its verbal expression within cultures "totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print.

"[4] Ong argues that the immediacy of sound, and the longevity of writing, correspond to the intrinsically different ways in which oral and literate societies and people function.

[5] In his studies of the Homeric Question, Milman Parry was able to show that the poetic metre found in the Iliad and the Odyssey had been 'packaged' by oral Greek society to meet its information management needs.

‘Residual orality’ refers to thought and its verbal expression in cultures that have been exposed to writing and print, but have not fully ‘interiorized’ (in McLuhan's term) the use of these technologies in their daily lives.

An oral community in Takéo , Cambodia , confronts writing . Modern scholarship has shown that orality is a complex and tenacious social phenomenon.
Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus , quoting the prophecy of Ammon (Thamus) : "[Writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. [..] You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.." (trans. H.N. Fowler; Line 275)