Orality, Literacy, and Code
1/1/2026
Walter Ong, in Orality and Literacy (Ong82), argues that the medium of thought profoundly shapes how we think. Ong focuses on the transition from oral cultures to literate ones. While he later considered digital media, computer programs were not central to Orality and Literacy; programming languages are not considered at all:
Although the full relationship of the electronically procesed word to the orality-literacy polarity with which this book concerns itself is too vast a subject to be considered in its totality here, some few points need to be made…
Programming languages are of course a small subset of the electronically processed word, but this was the first place my mind went to. When we consider the impact of literature on human history and how comparatively brief of a time computers have been around, I have to imagine the full scope of the impact of programming languages on human cognition has yet to be imagined. At first, I thought programming languages either sit outside Ong’s oral/literate spectrum or are simply another form of literature entirely. I now believe that they do belong on the same spectrum, but are not wholly subsumed by literature. I begin by examining some notable contrasts between orality and literacy before attempting to extend Ong’s analysis to programming languages.