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and alienation, it can also introduce a higher unity. Through changes in
communication media, we have also changed our forms of culture and
consciousness. Literacy and written documents are key to our American national
identity, according to Ong. 69
Based on theories from Ong, Goody, and others, Carolyn Marvin argues
certain features of texts and certain textual practices have broader effects: “literacy
produces cognitive effects that are culturally expressed as psychological
individualism and social heterodoxy. These features include the solitary nature of
reading, the preservative capacity of text, and the divorce of textual messages from
non-textual contexts of creation and transmission.” 70 Readers expand themselves
and can alienate themselves from traditional society. The very process of what
westerners describe as logical thought, or abstract thinking, is believed to develop
more readily among literates than among those with solely an oral culture. It
requires literacy for individuals to develop what we think of as intellectual
individuality. As Levine summarized, written words become symbols with no
independent existence. “Thus it is typically in literate societies that the concepts of
freedom of thought and speech can develop, for only literate societies believe that
verbal thought is separable from actions, that ideas are distinct from behavior, that
ideation can be contained. In non-literate societies such distinctions are not
made.” 71
In the last twenty years, Neil Postman has integrated work by these
historians with communication theory to form the multidisciplinary field of “Media
Ecology.” That field incorporated the work of historian Eisenstein, sociological
69 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen,
1982), 8-9, 32, and 178-9, and Ong, An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, Thomas
Farrell and Paul A. Soukup, eds., (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002), 467.
70 Carolyn Marvin, “Attributes of Authority: Literacy Tests and the Logic of Strategic
Conduct,” Communication (1988), 11:69.
71 Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 157.