ong's idea about literacy

Ong's overall statement of literacy is that "Literacy is imperious. It tends to arrogate to itself supreme power by taking itself as normative for human expression and thought." What he means is literacy is a necessary skill that everybody should have. In the illiterate part, he says that literacy is like a mechanical skill, which likes deriving a car and tying shoes. Then, he illustrate the importance of literacy by talking about two big part of literacy: writing and speaking. In writing, he says "For without a deep understanding of the normal oral or oral-aural con-sciousness and noetic economy of humankind before writing came along, it is impossible to grasp what writing accomplished." and "Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form." When describe speaking, he gives an example of thinking of word "nevertheless", he says that "A person from a completely oral background of course has no such problem. He or she will think only of the real word, a sequence of sounds, 'never-the-less'.