Ong sees Western cultural history as unfolding in four historically successive waves:
(1) primary oral culture (i.e., pre-literate culture), which has never come to an end;
(2) manuscript or chirographic culture involving writing with the phonetic alphabetic writing;
(3) print culture with the emergence of the Gutenberg movable printing press in the 1450s; and
(4) secondary oral culture with the rise of communication media that accentuate sound (e.g., television, radio, telephone, sound amplifications systems, sound recordings, including movies with soundtracks).
Because Ong's relationist way of thinking about major cultural developments is not yet a familiar way of thinking for most Americans, I should explain that Ong's relationist way of thinking does not involve straightforward cause-and-effect claims. Relationist claims are usually claims about significant factors and the interaction of those factors with one another. So let me illustrate how this kind of relationist thought works.
(1) No print culture, no modern capitalism as we know it in Western culture.
(2) No print culture, no modern science as we know it in Western culture.
(3) No print culture, no modern democracy as we know it in the United States or elsewhere in Western culture.
(4) No print culture, no Industrial Revolution as we know it in Western culture.
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