Orality of Literacy

The point in time I chose along Ong's 'Orality of Literacy' timeline was the point when Alexander Pope decides that all poets are expected to be original, and the readers had to react to the poem in a way where it could not be expressed any better. Even further if you were a romantic poet, you were expected to ideally be like god himself, creating phrases "out of nothing," or as it was expressed in latin, Ex nihilo. There were no cliches, no humor, no nothing. 

This is kind of interesting because it sounds like if you were a poet during this time, you were under a ton of pressure to produce great work. Today, poets have just about all the freedom in the world. They can write about whatever they want, use as many cliches as they want, be as unoriginal as they want, even put words in whatever format, or word order they want. I don't think we can say poetry was remediated from this exact point in time but there was a large evolutionary change in the way people continued to write poetry from this point on. 

No one writes their poetry as if they were god himself. No one writes their poetry in constant worry that they are saying the wrong thing. People today write poetry simply to get an idea or group of ideas out there, or on paper. Back in Pope's time people weren't so free to express their ideas on paper. As the reading explains, "In an oral culture, knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost; fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential for wisdom and effective administration." (pg. 23) 

In other words, people had to just walk around repeating and passing off bits of information to people or else it would be lost. However in Plato's day, everything changed. The passing on of knowledge was remediated into text, and the new way to store knowledge started to be through writing, and not speech. This "freed the mind for more original or abstract thought," which was evolutionary because it started this break from everything having to be perfect and original. People didn't have to write as if they are god, they could write as if they were themselves with their own ideas, and their own feelings of how to write a romantic poem. Which basically as time went on led to what we are doing right now....writing whatever the heck we want, and putting it on the internet for the whole world to see!