Spatializing of the Word

When a medium like hypertext meets late twentieth century readers and writers, will they make choices from lists of links and as a result know simultaneously a more open-ended and more internalized experience of language and meaning? Will readers and writers experience an intensified "sequential processing and spatializing of the word?" Ong says yes. (136)

"The sequential processing and spatializing of the word, initiated by writing and raised to new order of intensity by print, is further intensified by the computer, which maximizes commitment of the word to space and to (electronic) local motion and optimizes analytic sequentiality by making it virtually instantaneous" (Ong 136).

The shift from orality to literacy and on to electronic processing engages social, economic, political, and religious changes. The electronic age is also an age of secondary orality, the orality of telephones, radio, and television, which depends on writing and print for its existence.

Walter J. Ong