Ong: Communication Changing in the Modern Era

Reading the pieces from Ong, I found that his writing reminded me a lot of things that I had read in my Intro to Communication class my freshman year. He barely speaks about the digital era in either of his writings (until about halfway through), but I can't help but feel that they were very relevant to this course in that we need to understand the basic aspects of human communication before we can fully understand communication in digitization.

I thought it was interesting how in "Information and/or Communication" he references the lack of ability to have intimacy with someone through the wave of digitization. It reminded me a lot of the show Catfish, actually. 40 years ago people could send letters to each other and there was that sense of intimacy hen you were communicating with another because you recognized their handwriting. Now, there is the world of online dating and social networking - you have no idea if someone is who they say that they are.

In the Digitization article, I was really intrigued by the section on "Technologizing the Evanescent Oral World". Oral speech has changed so much over the years - new words are added to the dictionary daily. With the switch to the online world, words are being created all the time and actually used in everyday conversations. "Text Talk" is becoming increasingly more common (not that I agree with it). We had abbreviations for words long before the days of the internet, and yet those same concepts of making things easier to write still exists today.