Responses of "Ong's writing"

In part one, Ong argues for the importance of writing. People regarding literacy as a normative, unconscious and natural behavior like driving a car or tying shoe laces could severely restrict the understanding of real value of writing really and the accomplishments in human history. Such perspective also ignores the natural human mental processes that occur before writing enters the process of consciousness. This argument is clearly summarized in his quote, “We can now view in better perspective the world of writing in which we live, see better what this world really is, and what functionally literate human beings really are – that is, beings whose thought processes do not grow out of simply natural powers but out of these powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of writing.”
In the next part, Ong criticizes on Plato’s argumentation of writing which is based on four different reasons. These are the same objections commonly used against computers. He says the arguments of Plato are defective by mentioning “once the word is technologized, there is no really effective way to criticize its condition without the aid of the technology you are criticizing.”