Typography's Impact on Mind and Culture

Numerous intellectuals have debated on the effects that typography has on the mind. An example of two such intellectuals are Walter Ong and Neil Postman. In Walter Ong’s “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” he describes the difference between oral and typographic cultures and the resulting effects each had on the mind while in Chapter 4 of Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” similarly focuses on how typography has molded the way that we think, which has become very structured and writing-like, and how that effects public discourse. Overall, both their pieces serve to demonstrate how typography arrogates itself into our lives and is forever embedded in our conscious and unconscious mind, which illuminates how technology is

Many were once against typography when it first emerged. One prime example was Plato, who Ong and Postman both mention at some point in their work. In fact, Ong states that “Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can only be in the mind. Writing is simply a thing, something to be manipulated, something inhuman, artificial, a manufactured product” (Ong 27). He then goes on to say that many have made the same argument about computers today. However, the essential message from this quote is that many believed that these technologies would have a negative effect on the way we think. Ong goes on to disprove Plato’s rationale by explaining that “…his philosophically analytic thought, including his analysis of the effects of writing, was only possible because of the effects that writing was having on mental processes” (Ong 29). Due to the fact that he was even able to analyze typography meant that he was subsuming to typography’s nature. Postman would agree that Plato would not have been able to formulate his analytic views if it were not for writing. Postman wrote that literacy is highly rational. He iterated that discourse in a culture dominated by print tend to have a coherent arrangement of an idea, a fact, or a claim. Postman would explain to Ong that the cause of this is similar to some of the reasons Plato

Ong believes that some technologies act in the same way that old technologies do. For example, the calculator is an external resource for thinking similar to how writing is an external source for thinking. Moreover, Ong believes that new technologies as well as the old have a power that we are oblivious to. He states, “…writing is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word” (Ong 32). Technology has a great ability to manipulate the people using it, which can be a positive thing if it is properly interiorized. Instead of degrading human life, as Postman seems to believe, new technology can, on the contrary, enhance it. Postman explains that photography shattered context which lead to the decline of rationality in advertisement. The effect that this has on the public is that it also makes them irrational as well as seek and distribute information that is out of context, as Postman discusses in later chapters of his book. Even so, Ong believes, “The use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge human spirit, set it free, intensify its interior life” (Ong33). Although Postman seems to believe that writing does this in regards to public discourse but he would