Perhaps more fundamental than the difference between print and other modes of writing is the difference between writing and orality. To write is to choose not to be oral.

In seeking to read or write, we are, in some sense, seeking to escape orality.

The oral paradigm is distinguished by various characteristics. Ong suggests the following: the concept of the sounded word as power and action, memory limited to what one can independently recall (mnemenics and formulas), additive rather than subordinate thinking, aggregative rather than analytic thinking, redundance or copiousness of expression, traditional thinking, proximity of thought to the 'lifeworld,' agonistically toned expression, emphatic and partcipatory rather than objectively distanced thought, a homeostatic view of the world (it is always the present, and only a few older persons remember relevant events in a vastly distant past), situational rather than abstract thinking. We write to enjoy alternatives to all of these characteristics.

To write is to spacialize language. Words are otherwise only ephemeral sound. With writing, we can structure language and thought, we can enjoy the illusion of moving forward, or setting something out, of building toward something. However illusive.

We write because there is no other technology to render this illusion of movement possible. No other technology that enables us to create architectural structures with language. To enjoy the illusion of an advance in one's thinking. To travel, to go distances, to be exposed to the unknown, by virtue of words alone. To create poetry and music with words. To dwell on them in ways we wouldn't otherwise.

Well into late manuscript culture, Ong points out that writing retained a large measure of deference to the word as sound. Texts were read aloud, experienced socially by being read to groups, and were thought of primarily as transcriptions of spoken language. The paradigm of writing was rhetoric, or oratory.

Oratory is not the same as orality. The three concepts should be distinguished: orality, oration, speech. Orality, and the oral tradition, is a distinct paradigm, exemplified by certain aboriginal figures, for instance, or peoples from non-European cultures with a tenuous connection to literacy. Against Ong, I believe that one can remain immersed in the oral tradition in spite of one's exposure to writing. For Ong, a culture departs from the oral tradition once writing has been generally internalized by the culture in a broad sense. I disagree. I think this internalization takes place on an individual level, and a culture can retain, in certain persons, a large sedimentation of orality.

Print radicalized writing. It reified language: turned text into objects, or pre-existing things. Ong suggests that it did this because before printed type, each instance of a written sign was a unique example of that sign; a hand-print. Moveable type made no single instance unique, and all instances copies of an ideal. It also brought a sense of closure and finality to text, and it silenced the conversation between writer and manuscript reader or copier. Space was used more selfishly by the printed writer.

Text was also clearer and enabled for more rapid, silent, internalized reading. With print, then, text became more visual than aural. The author was a self-contained, autonomous, elevated being, who controlled and dispensed with the technology of writing to an accentuated degree. Writing in this age was more analytic, more structured, more unreadable (aloud), less rhetorical, more monumental. Kant, Johnson.

Ong writes: "Learned tongues textualize the idea of language, making it seem at root something written. Print reinforces the sense of language as essentially textual. The printed text, not the written text, is the text in its fullest, paradigmatic form." It is precisely in this sense that print, and not other forms of writing, creates authors. Other texts are written, printed texts are authored.

But the final ingredient in creating authors is the law. Without legal recognition of the writer's privilege over the text, the structure would be broken. Texts could be tampered with once printed, made diffuse and contradictory. The law does not simply inscribe protection for the formal structure of printing, it facilitates that structure. Without the protection of law, the culture and paradigm of the printed book would remain dialogic in the sense of manuscript culture. Instead, the law recognizes the political significance of publishing, and creates authors in a closely related sense that it creates citizens.

The model for writing in print culture is visual and textual, as opposed to rhetorical or aural. In the age of the network and of multi-media, the paradigm of writing is neither orality nor oratory, but speech.

In manuscript culture, the model of language -- not only writing but language itself -- is rhetoric. In print culture, the model of language is printed text. In the age of multi-media, the model of language is neither oratory nor orality, but speech.

Speech here bears characteristics of orality and oratory, but it is neither orality nor oratory. Viable commercial speech in the present culture betrays a large measure of internalized literacy. The people talking on television, in film, on the radio, etc., are articulate. They know how to talk well, smoothly, humourously, and they talk fast, without too much redundance, and with a measure of linearity. Their sense of memory and structure is not that of orality. But since public speech does not bear the same political connotations that it did in the past (there is no longer a strict divide between public and private speech), it need not assume the tropes of classical oratory, except in the overtly political context.

What remains of the book and the author

Publishers select certain manuscripts or content from a sea of possible candidates. Texts are then made ubiquitous, though accessible only as commodities. The web makes a billion texts accessible, but hardly detectable. If search engines have indexed only twenty per cent of the net, do the other pages really exist? If so, where?

The network, in other words, requires a degree of hierarchy, selection, and topographic organization. The network is not inimical to hierarchy of a kind. Web pages have home pages. The net has portals, etc. The publication of books functions in a similar way: it helps us navigate the web and find useful information.

But what we find in the book is more than just information. Written content on the web is somewhere between email and the book, but mostly closer to email. The published book is still a more radical form of writing: a more intensely condensed, refined, crafted work than we would find on the net. The economics of publishing make this necessary.

There may be more and better information available on the web, but the function of the book is guaranteed for a long time to come by virtue of being a kind of elaborate portal to a subject. Instead of listing links to all of the references relevant to a given subject, the book summarizes the content of those links in one place. It makes a whole network understood, however summarily.

The web succumbs in this way to limitations similar in nature to those of orality. A certain circularity, brevity, and shallowness is endemic to information on the web. To break past this, the technology of writing is the only tool. Writing summarizes, condenses, orders, etc., while the net links, lists, and updates.

The difference here isn't going to disappear when books go electronic and are read on ebooks or websites. There will still be, and have to be, places -- physical, geographical, but also cybernetic, hypertextual, etc. -- where readers and writers can go to find the kinds of texts they associate with the quality of printed text.

The institution of the publisher and the publication isn't one we're ready to let go of yet.

Publication is, after all, a two way exchange: the writer acquires the cache of writing within the space of, say, Gallimard's or Faber and Faber's pages, or the New Yorker, while the publication gains from hosting a well-known writer. Neither is a symbol of quality in itself. But writing for a print publication as opposed to the web necessitates a more compact, refined performance.

The author still bears a residue of his or her high-print-era self. While they're no longer monoliths, masters, or authorities, the author's name today signifies a degree of functional expertise. A fiction writer by the name of Stephen King spins a good yarn. A non-fiction writer by the name of George Gilder really knows his technology and has been known to make a few accurate predictions. Authority exists today in relation to some given purpose -- which can never be simply 'writing well.'

Belle lettres, literature, the literary have all, in this sense, been dissipated and dispersed. A writer might be literary, but the market requires a more specific angle. If you do not fit one, or come up with a new one, you prove unmarketable. Heighten. To understand what's marketable and what isn't is to ask what will work in a multi-media culture and what wouldn't, and why.