Before I get into the subject that I am going to focus mainly on, I wanted to give one more testimony about how memory palaces are amazing. As many of you may know I am a business major as well as a lit major. In business, we focus a lot on communication. The latest chapter in one of my classes talked about communication in conjunction with using the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The book had us do an exercise where we used the two sides to see which one was our stronger side. The text said that usually one side is much stronger than the other. However, using the memory palace techniques that I have learned in this class, my two sides were almost the same and better than most of the rest of the class.
I have spent the last few days reading the Chapter 5 in Orality and Literacy. There is a massive amount of information that is very helpful and if it isn't helpful in memory improvements, it is at least interesting. Sifting through this amassed information, one passage/section stuck in my memory. It talked about the shift from orality to literacy in the sense that made words into a commodity. "Print created a new sense of the private ownership of words" (Ong 128). This one sentence struck me as so profound. Coming from a completely literary tradition, I had never before considered that words couldn't be a private commodity. Throughout my entire life (all 21 years), I have spent as much of my time reading as I possibly could and I even entertain the idea of becoming a writer as my career path so ownership of words is vital to my lifestyle. I have even gone so far as to re-purchase books if I somehow lose them just so I can re-read the text and validate my ownership of the story. I re-purchase books not because I can't remember the storyline but because I want to reaffirm in my memory exactly how the words looked on the page so as to cement it into my memory even more firmly.
According to Ong, this leads back to a subject that I had previously addressed and one that has greatly interested Ong throughout his book: the restructuring of the unconscious. The restructuring of the unconscious is a suject that one could study for the rest of one's life and never run out of pertinent information. The aspect that Ong introduces at this point is the individualism of literacy. Again I had never before grasped the concept of reading in this manner but he is completely right. Reading is an individual endeavor, which is why it so draws me towards it. As a child, my family would either ban my books during dinner, family celebrations (e.i. Christmas), or any other time that they wanted my attention. And if they didn't ban my books, they would steal them and hide them so I was forced to converse, like a normal human being. I would be given my book(s) back when I had acted sufficiently like a normal kid and told my parents about my day or played with my little brother. To me this exemplifies the change that Ong was talking about. In the Oral Tradition, no one would have been able to take away from me the "commodity" of words, nor would they have wanted to because it would have been a shared endeavor. In fact one could go so far as to say, reading is the equivalent of television to older generations, specifically ones of the primary oral tradition. As a child I often heard how television was one of the reasons for the decline of family time, intelligence, and children playing to gain sufficient physical activity for their physical well-being.
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