According to Ong, a new medium affects a whole culture. The invention of writing freed memory. Printing from movable type made books cheaper and so available to more people. Books meant individual rather than collective communication and thus encouraged individualism rather than community. The telegraph made possible nearly instantaneous communication.
Electronic media reduce our sense of isolation and individualism.
According to Ong, we are shifting toward secondary orality , that is, communal interpretations of mediated rather than immediate messages. It is a modern version of the primary orality of nonliterate cultures, where communication was transmitted directly to the community. Printed media will continue, but electronic media will change the way we read. New Formats for Media Hypertext Hypertext is nonsequential writing. It differs from traditional writing in the order of reading, the centrality of the text, and the power of the author.