This entire site intends to be an exploration of this question, but to begin, we need at least a working definition.

Basically, orality is about how human language works when it's only spoken and heard (as if we didn't have writing). What this does is that it makes everything from thinking to sharing stories super immediate, memorable, and often focused on the community.

It's how humans communicated and preserved their culture through live words before writing, and you can see some of those dynamic, group-oriented characteristics drive the way we use social media today (YouTube, IG, TikTok), which, right now, is called secondary orality, but in reality, when Ong coined the term, he hadn't even seen the Internet yet. So I believe it's due for a reconsideration, the idea of an orality with literate characteristics.

A more detailed definition

Orality primarily describes language as a spoken and heard phenomenon, deeply rooted in the world of sound and experienced as fleeting events rather than static visual objects. In cultures untouched by writing, known as primary oral cultures, words possess a dynamic power derived from their vocal production and immediate evanescence. This fundamental nature profoundly shapes human consciousness, thought processes, and memory, leading to distinct characteristics:

  • Mnemonic and Formulaic Thought: Knowledge is retained and transmitted through patterns, repetitions, alliterations, epithets, and standard thematic formulas. Thought is intimately intertwined with memory systems, making non-formulaic thinking largely impractical for retention. Oral poets, for instance, compose during performance by drawing from a vast repertoire of formulas and themes, adapting them to audience and context rather than memorizing verbatim texts.
  • Aggregative and Contextual: Oral thought tends to be additive and aggregative rather than analytical or abstract, preferring clusters of ideas and retaining traditional expressions intact. Knowledge is embodied, closely linked to the human lifeworld and situational experience, with concepts understood in operational rather than formally abstract terms.
  • Empathetic and Agonistic: Oral communication fosters close, empathetic, and participatory identification with the known, uniting people in groups. Verbal expression often has an agonistic tone, involving rhetorical combat, boasting, and challenges, which serve not only to store knowledge but also to engage others.
  • Interiority and Community: Sound incorporates and envelops the hearer, establishing a sense of being at the center of one's auditory world, fostering a perception of the cosmos as an ongoing event. The spoken word inherently forms human beings into close-knit groups, a stark contrast to the solitary nature of reading written texts.

With the advent of electronic (digital) media, and even newer forms of writing technologies that permeate our culture, we no longer see these features develop on their own. They are necessarily informed by writing technologies including but not limited to the written word. When we add in radio, television, the Internet, smartphones, the digital recording and manipulation of sound and sight, we begin to see mass audience formation and a self-conscious, deliberate approach to spontaneity. Hip Hop, for example, is described as a "post-literate orality" that fuses literate elements with orally-based expressions, often using sampling as a practice to reconstitute cultural formulas and themes in recorded sound.

In essence, orality highlights the dynamic, embodied, and communal essence of spoken language and its profound influence on human cognition and social structures, in contrast to the distancing and objectifying effects of literacy. Even with these literate and post-literate interventions, orality remains active underneath, a still driving force that can inform the way we embrace future technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality.