Walter J. Ong (2002 [1982]) _Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word_, London: Routledge.

The differences between orality and writing are investigated by Walter J. Ong in _Orality and Literacy_ (2002), arguing that the electronic age has sharpened our understanding - not least through the 'secondary orality' of media communications that all depend on writing in various ways (such as scripts for radio and television, and written programs for computing). Even if mathematics underlies these linguistic procedures, in terms of human communication, speech underlies that. Whereas Saussure takes writing to be a complement to speech, Ong takes the relation to be more complex and dynamic. More specifically, what distinguishes Ong's work is that he writes about 'primary orality'; attending to those speakers unfamiliar with writing rather than study those that can read and write.
However some speech relies on writing. Rhetoric is a case in point, its Greek origins 'techne rhetorike' meaning 'speech art' referring to oral speaking. In Aristotle's _Art of Rhetoric_, rhetoric is taken to be the organised product of writing, revealing how orality has been enhanced by writing rather than simply representing it. In this sense, oral art-forms are literary, governed by carefully worked out rules and honed skills; what Ong calls 'Oral Literature' (2002: 10). (note: Greek 'rhetor' is linked to the same etymological root as the latin ''orator' meaning public speaker.) 

Written texts are related to the world of speech, either directly or indirectly, as is all language necessarily. The spoken word haunts all texts ('sound is the natural habitat of language', as Ong puts it (2002: 8)), and writing is spoken (if only silently) to reveal its meanings to the reader/listener. The irony, as Ong points out, is that in writing about orality and literacy, he relies on written literacy to deliver his argument and not an oral performance. Similarly with these words you are reading not listening to, although evidently we sound out the words directly or indirectly as we read. 

In speaking, the speaker imagines addressing someone before they speak (even when speaking to oneself). When a speaker addresses an audience, people tend towards a collective whole, but when reading tend towards private contemplation. Speech tends towards collective and public forms of address and action.   

In oral cultures, or primary orality as Ong puts it, words take on special (even magical) powers and agency. For example, the Hebrew term 'dobar' means 'word' and 'event', and referring to the work of Malinowski, Ong emphasies how amongst ('primitive') people unfamiliar with writing, language is a mode of action and not only a referent of thinking. Words are active. In the Bible, for instance, orality is maintained through its style of prose, and of course because it is taken from oral accounts - and through the authority of the word of God. The Bible although written by human authors is always the word of God. God is author like no other writing. Such myths emphasise how: 'The spoken word is always an event, a movement in time, completely lacking in the thing-like repose of the written or printed word.' (2002: 74). It follows that oral utterances, emanating from inside living beings, are thoroughly active. Spoken utterance is live and it comes from living beings to other living beings. More anthropologically: 
 'Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to be assimilated to things, "out there" on a flat surface. Such "things" are not so readily associated with magic, for they are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamic resurrection.' (Ong 2002: 32-3) 

The power of these interconnections is what the technology of writing attempts to capture (although always incompletely), and in so doing it has transformed human consciousness. Rather than the Platonic idea that the technologies of writing or computing are artificial and weaken memory and consciousness (note: for instance, in Plato's _Phaedrus_), is a rather partial account of its effects. In contrast, Ong stresses that writing is the most radical of technologies, setting forth processes that computing plainly continues, 'the reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist' (2002: 81). Although the argument _Coding Praxis_ is rather different in suggesting that the dynamic and real-time processes of program code are speech-like. 

Such processes affect consciousness and culture. The evidence of how writing has transformed human cultures is well documented, from the first written scripts developed by the Sumerians (in circa 3500 BC) to the printing press of the middle ages in Europe. This is writing in the sense that it stands for utterance, not simply representations of things in pictures or symbols but a representation of what is spoken. Chinese writing complicates this separation in that it is particularly complex in combining pictures and speech, through its vast number of characters (the K'anghsi dictionary of Chinese in AD 1716 contains 40,545 characters, taking about twenty years to learn, according to Ong 2002: 86, although the official language of Mandarin is replacing such richness, replacing its elitism with homogeneity).  

Chinese:
Most work in this area contrasts orality and alphabetical written forms rather than other writing systems such as Chinese characters or indeed program code. But Ong's work is not concerned with computer languages that resemble human languages that for him remain unlike human languages in that they do not emanate from the unconscious but directly out of consciousness:
'Computer language rules ('grammar') are stated first and thereafter used. The 'rules' of grammar in natural languages are used first and can be abstracted from usage and stated explicitly in words only with difficulty and never completely.' (2002: 7) 

Criticism (add to other sections):
There is a tendency to associate the verbal art work with the visual object world, making a poem more an object than an event. But sounds resists its reduction to objectness, fixed in time and space, instead it is dynamic and context bound. In the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, he focussed on oral narrative, taking it to be structured like the language system itself - through contrasting elements, such as phonemes and morphemes, in binaries such as the raw and the cooked. In Derrida's deconstructionism, writing is not taken as a supplement to the speech, but as a separate performance. So rather than the reader's commonly held assumption that there is necessarily a referent to the word in speech - what he calls 'logocentrism' - writing is seen as a break from speech. Therefore, to Derrida, language is is not representational or referential but means nothing. The paradox is unavoidable in that the writing is representational even when declaring it is not. Like Plato denouncing writing for orality, such views are expressed in writing (Ong 2002: 164).

Speech-act theory:
Austin and Searle are associated with speech-act theory. It distinguishes the 'locutionary' act (the act producing an utterance, a structuring of words, eg. 'hello world'), the 'illocutionary' act (an act expressing the interaction between utterer and recipient, eg. a greeting like 'hello' as opposed to another mode of address), and the 'perlocutionary' act (an act producing intended effects such as surprise). It underpins the cooperative aspect of conversation in a quite different way than writing. Ong thinks it lacks attention to oral and especially to written communication in what be referred to as a 'text-act' (2002: 167; the term is taken from Winifred B. Horner). In this context, the idea is to focus on the 'code-act' (not the 'code-object'). For instance, in examining the nineteenth century's fictional address to the reader (Dear Reader...) and imagining scenarios where 'Dear computer...' is enacted.