ONG Chapter 5. Quotes of Interest.

Reading through the chapter, I came across a few quotes that left me thinking, and quite possibly gave me some ideas for my term paper.

pg. 117 'sight is often deceived, hearing serves as guarantee.'

This quote was interesting to me because I would have thought this expression to be the other way around. For sometimes someone hears something and translates the words in their heads in a way that the other person did not mean them to come out. Usually seeing something with your own eyes is more of a guarantee than hearing something that was said by someone else. Nonetheless, intriguing.

pg. 119 "Our attitudes are the ones that have changed, and thus that need to be explained. Why does the original, presumably more 'natural' procedure seem wrong with us? Because we feel the printed words before us as visual units (even though we sound them at least in imagination when we read).
"All test involves sight and sound."

pg. 123 "Manuscript culture had preserved a feeling for a book as a kind of utterance, an occurrence in the course of conversation, rather than as an object."

pg. 134 "Like primary orality, secondary orality has generated a strong group sense, for listening to spoken words forms hearers into a group, a true audience, just as reading written or printed texts turns individuals in on themselves."

"In our age of secondary orality, we are groupminded self-consciously and progmatically. The individual feels that he or she, as an individual, must be socially sensitve. Unlike members of a primary oral culture, who are turned outward because they have had little occasion to turn inward, we are turned outward because we have turned inward."

After reading these two quotes, I feel like this is a topic that I might want to dive into a little further for my paper. The idea of primary orality creating a group, and secondary orality focusing on the individual interests me. Has the secondary orality culture taken us away from a "pack" mentality and created a culture where we are more focused on the individual, hense, making us more aware of others because we have become aware of our own truths? Anways. Not sure if im making any sense of this, or going anywhere, but I am interested in doing some comparing between primary and secondary oral cultures.