Orality and Literacy: Secondary Orality - Bryan Trumble

“The electronic as is also an age of ‘secondary orality’, the orality of telephones, radio, and television, which depends on writing and print for its existence”
This quote from Walter Ong’s book Orality and Literacy poses the idea of technology as being dependent on the very orality which it eradicated by its evolution. This is an interesting juxtaposition of concepts. The ideas of orality and technology are almost direct opposites. Technology had its beginnings back with the dawn of writing which slowly began to rid cultures of their oral nature. The invention of writing allowed people to more easily keep track of records and information, laws and religion and therefore began to oust orality as a way of preserving culture and identity.
The concept of ‘secondary orality’ is very ambiguous for the above mentioned reasons. But it is interesting to note how the increased use of writing has done an about face and in turn lead to orality. However this orality is based upon a prewritten script and for this reason one could argue it’s not really a type of orality at all but more of a vocalized literacy. The words are already written out so there is no changing the story to suite the audience in most cases. Yet on the flip side the authors have already catered the script to the viewing/listening audience. So in these ways while this ‘secondary orality’ is very different from ‘primary orality’ it is also noticed at times that the two types of orality almost mirror each other.
An interesting mixture of the two oralities would be the constant use of improv on radio and TV. In this case the actors/broadcasters would be embracing a ‘primary orality’ that was used to communicate to people through highly technological means. This would certainly change the people who were on radio and TV making them much more like the Homeric bards of ancient Greece. The connotation of the communication however would be completely different than that of the ancient bards. The quote hints at this concept in mentioning the telephone among TV and radio.
The use of the telephone, while very oral in nature still removes people greatly from the words of conversation. The listener can not hear voice in flections as well, and both parties can not see the expressions of the other’s body language to gauge how the message is being sent and received. This shows how the use of technology has created an orality that is much more distanced from the original oral culture. This is also seen in the radio and TV scene because the broadcasters/actors can not see the audience to gauge their reaction or interact with them directly at any level at all.