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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) October 19, 2024: My admittedly modest claim to fame is based on my many publications over the years about the work of the famous American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter Jackson Ong, Jr. (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in the City of St. Louis, Missouri - where I took five courses from Father Ong over the years.

My award-winning book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Hampton Press, 2000) is an introductory survey of Ong's life and eleven of his books and selected articles. My book received the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in Media Ecology, conferred by the Media Ecology Association in June 2001.

To spell out the obvious, the expression "media ecology" is formed from the widely known term ecology.

I recently came across what I will refer to here as an example of a media-ecology sensibility in the Wikipedia entry on the "Internet":

"Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper mail, and newspapers, are reshaped, redefined, or even bypassed by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as email, Internet telephone, Internet television, online music, digital newspapers, and video streaming websites. Newspapers, books, and other [forms of] print publishing have adapted to website technology or have been reshaped into blogging, web feeds, and online instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking services. Online shopping has grown exponentially for major retailers, small businesses, and entrepreneurs, as it enables firms to extend their 'brick and mortar' presence to serve a larger market or even sell goods and services entirely online. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

Please note that the original text in the Wikipedia entry shows no superscript numerals in this paragraph - meaning that none of the sentences in this paragraph are quotations from a media ecology source. Hence, I refer to this paragraph as expressing a media-ecology sensibility.

In any event, I have also discussed Ong's thought about media ecology in my 1991 essay "Secondary Orality and consciousness Today" in the well-organized anthology Media, consciousness, and culture: Explorations of Walter Ong's Thought, edited by Bruce E. Gronbeck, Thomas J. Farrell, and Paul A. Soukup (Sage Publishing, pp. 194-209).

Ong famously coined the term secondary orality to refer to the orality of communications media that accentuate sound (such as the telephone, radio, television, tape-recorders, and the like), on the one hand, and, on the other, to differentiate our contemporary secondary orality from the ancient and pre-historic primary orality that dominated human existence before the invention of phonetic alphabetic writing systems.

For further discussion of phonetic alphabetic writing systems, see Ong's Chapter 4: "Writing restructures consciousness" in his most widely read, and his most widely translated, 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen, pp. 78-116).

Ong's first extended discussion of the history of media ecology in our Western cultural history can be found in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press; for specific pages references to what is now known as media ecology, see the entry on aural-to-visual shift in the "Index" [p. 396]). Peter Ramus (1515-1572) was a French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr.

But also see Ong's discussion of the sensorium in his 1967 seminal book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press; for specific page references to the sensorium, see the "Index" [p. 356]), the expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University.

Now, in my 1991 essay "Secondary Orality and consciousness Today," I take various hints from Ong in my discussion of consciousness today. I draw on the thought of the Freudian psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson's account of the eight stages of psychosexual development, on the one hand, and, on the other, the thought of the Jungian psychoanalyst Erich Neumann's account of the eight stages of consciousness. Briefly, taking a hint from Ong himself, I connect what Ong refers to as secondary orality in our contemporary culture with what Neumann refers to as stage seven in the stages of consciousness.

Now, in Erikson's account of the eight stages of psychosexual development, he refers to stage eight as Old Age. He sees the crucial crisis of Old Age as involving what he refers to as integrity versus despair.

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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