1. Where does media history start?  Orality and Literacy  The Print Revolution  Modern Times (here’s one version) Richard Wagner?

2. Orality and Literacy  Primary Orality  Literacy –Scripts –“The” Alphabet  “High” Literacy  Secondary Orality

3. Primary Orality-- Speculative  “Pristine,” “natural” p. 78  What would this mean for history?  What would this mean for law?  What would this mean for science?  Religion? (105)  Narrative drive p. 99

4. Literacy – A Technology  “Artificial” p. 82  Where did writing come from? (86)  When? Under what conditions?  Plato’s complaints in the Phaedrus (79)

5. The Alphabet  A spectrum of written languages, from more phonographic (Finnish) to more logographic (Chinese)  Where did the alphabet come from?  When? Under what conditions?  What IS it? –Sound –Name –Shape

6. Ong’s Determinism The language of (technological) determinism? “Writing restructures consciousness” “The Greek Alphabet was democratizing” (90)

7. Methodological Wrinkles  How can we know anything about orality?  Plato’s pitfall (p. 80)  Ong’s little joke (p. 96)  The example of Homer (p. 99)  The example of Genesis (p. 99)

8. Orality lives on  Ong’s examples of Rhetoric and Learned Latin  The Alphabet song (100)  The Alphabet historicized  “Secondary” Orality?