Jonathan Haidt 2012 03.
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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) March 28, 2024: In my adult life, I have expended a lot of time and energy writing about the mature thought from the early 1950s onward of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter Jackson Ong, Jr. (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955).
Over the years, I took five courses from Father Ong at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in the City of St. Louis, Missouri - my alma mater (class of 1966; M.A.(T.) in English, 1968; Ph.D. in education, 1973).
I wrote an introductory-level book about Ong's life and work titled Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Hampton Press, 2000; revised and expanded second edition, 2015). It received the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field Media Ecology, conferred by the Media Ecology Association in 2001.
I have discussed Ong's account of the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press) in my somewhat lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):
Incidentally, Peter Ramus (1515-1572) was a French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr. He wrote most of his works in Latin, the lingua franca of his day, and his works were widely known in educated circles in Continental Europe and in England (where John Milton studied Ramist logic at Cambridge University) and in the English colony in New England (where Ramist logic dominated the curriculum at the newly founded Harvard College).
Harvard's Perry Miller discussed Ramus extensively in his massively researched 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press; for specific page references to Ramus, see the "Index" [p. 528]).
When the young Canadian convert to Catholicism Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943), fresh from his studies at Cambridge University, was teaching English at Saint Louis University and continuing to work on his 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation, he called young Walter Ong's attention to Perry Miller's massively researched 1939 book. When Ong later proceeded to undertake Ph.D. studies in English at Harvard University, Perry Miller served as the director of Ong's massively researched doctoral dissertation about Ramus and the history of the verbal arts of logic and rhetoric in our Western cultural history.
McLuhan's 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation was published posthumously, unrevised by with an editorial apparatus, as the 2006 book The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, edited by W. Terrence Gordon (Gingko Press; for specific page references to Ramus, see the "Index" [p. 274]).
Much later, McLuhan published his ambitious and controversial 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press; for specific page references to Ong's publications about Ramus and Ramist logic, see the "Bibliographic Index" [pp. 286-287]).
Now, I have also discussed the importance of Ong's work for understanding our contemporary culture in my essay "Secondary Orality and Consciousness Today" in the anthology Media, Consciousness, and Culture: Explorations of Walter Ong's Thought, edited by Bruce E. Gronbeck, Thomas J. Farrell, and Paul A. Soukup (Sage Publishing, 1991, pp. 194-209). For Ong, secondary orality refers to the orality of communications media that accentuate sound - including television.
Now, the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (born in 1963; Ph.D. in social psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 1992) of New York University's Stern School of Business is a Jewish atheist who respects spirituality. In his disturbing and cogently argued but remarkably accessible new 2024 book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Random House), he is concerned about the impact of smartphones and social media on the mental health of Gen Z - and Haidt identifies four specific harms of smartphones and social media: (1) Social Deprivation; (2) Sleep Deprivation; (3) Attention fragmentation; and (4) Addiction (esp. pp. 113-172).
Now, according to the Wikipedia entry on "Social Media," the World Wide Web was founded in 1991, and social media started in the mid-1990s. Ong published comparatively few articles in the 1990s.
For a briefly annotated bibliography of Ong's 400 or so distinct publications (not counting translations and reprintings as distinct publications), see Thomas M. Walsh' "Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the 2011 anthology Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (Hampton Press, pp. 185-245).
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