Orwell, Snowden, and Privacy in Light of Ong's Cultural History

For years, though, we Americans were not always sure that we were getting reliable news about the (now former) Soviet Union and certain other countries around the globe. Nevertheless, McLuhan's expression "the global village" was a handy way to encapsulate our emerging sense that our awareness about events and people around the world was undergoing a shift.

In this respect, our consciousness was undergoing a shift. As a matter of fact, we Americans are still undergoing this shift in consciousness.

However, in addition to the content that news from around the globe feeds into our consciousness (i.e., our conscious awareness), Ong sees the communication media that accentuate sound as bringing about a shift from the highly visualist orientation of our American cultural conditioning in print culture.

Out of considerations of space, I am not going to give a full-blown explanation of Ong's account of Western cultural history here. Instead, I highlight only certain selected points. For example, I highlight here the aural-to-visual shift. But Ong takes into account a number of other related cultural infrastructures that I do not happen to discuss here.

The Gutenberg printing press emerged in the 1450s. Over subsequent centuries print culture developed in Western culture.

Ong highlights the role of the Gutenberg printing press in advancing the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing that Ong sees as emerging in distinctively literate thought in ancient Greek philosophy as exemplified in the work of Plato and Aristotle. But Ong also sees this aural-to-visual shift carried forward in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and in ancient and medieval Catholic theology.

However, according to Ong, the Gutenberg printing press led to a far fuller flowering of the aural-to-visual shift than anything that had happened before the emergence of print culture.

For Ong, the flowering of the aural-to-visual shift represents one of the central psychodynamisms the contributed historically to the development of print culture and the development of modern capitalism, modern science, modern democracy (including our American experiment in democracy), the Industrial Revolution, and the Romantic Movement in literature and the arts.

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