Orality and Literacy Quote- Corey Maiden

"The basic orality of language is permanent." (Ong 7)

I read this quote from Ong's, Orality and Literacy and almost immediately began to question whether this is really true. It makes sense if we are talking about literacy in contract to spoken word, but the technology of language has gone far past that point now. The reason I began to doubt the validity of this statement is that we have so many different ways of communicating today that no one will believe a rumor until it is “Facebook official”. And another technology that is a grey area for me is recorded speech. This form of communication is oral but does not carry the same meaning as face to face conversation, and yet it is the only source of information that people consider credible. It seems to me that people are surprisingly willing to sacrifice face to face conversation for the comfort of technology such as computers and cell phones.