Alanna Dailey - Writing v. Memory

Orality and Literacy: Writing v. Memory: Required Reading
In the section “From Memory to Written Records” in his work Orality and Literacy (pgs. 95-99), Ong discusses how when the written word first became important, people did not trust it. During medieval times, people were much more likely to person’s oral testimony than written documents. Seeing how authority figures could abuse writing for personal gain in the feudal system, it is easy to see how people would not trust written records. Of course in today’s society we think the opposite. We trust written records over memory. Even in court cases people give more credit to written statements from professionals than to personal accounts of witnesses. I think this trust in written records came about in the Enlightenment period. This era stressed logic, reason, and science over everything else. People saw the records could be accessed years later and the account would still be there in perfect detail.
Another reason why we mistrust memory is because our thinking has changed. In ancient times people memorized everything. I was taught disciples of rabbis were required to the entire Hebrew Bible in memory, and the rabbi would often test his disciples making them reference certain passages. For me, even trying to memorize one book of the Bible is overwhelming, so the thought of learning the entire Hebrew Bible is even more stressful. Logic, reason, and written documents made it so we do not have to memorize everything. To make matters worse, we have scientific test (what we trust above all else) telling us that memory is not that reliable. These tests “prove” that court case witnesses do not have has good of memory as the claim. Our way of thinking has changed from memory to written documents and therefore so has our trust.