Walter Ong

Walter Ong was an American Jesuit priest and scholar who explored how different communication media—oral, manuscript, print, electronic—fundamentally shape human consciousness, thought, and social organization. His book Orality and Literacy (1982) is a landmark in media theory and literacy studies, and his concept of secondary orality proved remarkably prescient for the digital age.

Developed the concept of secondary orality for electronic and digital media; argued that oral and literate cultures have fundamentally different structures of thought and social organization; Orality and Literacy synthesized anthropology, linguistics, rhetoric, and media theory into a coherent framework.