Between Orality and Literacy: Plato’s Hybrid Medium and the Foundations of Media Theory

Abstract

The group known as the Toronto School of Communication—primarily Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter J. Ong—charted the development of ancient Greek culture as a passage from formulaic Homeric orality to linear Platonic literacy. Their account relied on the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, which compared formulaic aspects of oral poetry in contemporaneous Yugoslavia with the compositional patterns recorded by the ancients. Havelock and Ong argued that Plato’s dialogues mark the division between orality and literacy in ancient Greek culture; and according to McLuhan, Plato “straddled the old Homeric world” and a “new, rational civilized world,” serving as the paradigm for examining changes in thought, language, and culture that came with innovations in media in subsequent eras. In the decades since, however, scholars have uncovered telltale formulaic patterns in Plato, and there have been new findings concerning connections between Greek and Near Eastern literatures and cultures. The combined weight of this evidence indicates that the empirical and theoretical foundations laid by the Toronto theorists needs reassessing. On this basis, this chapter suggests a more nuanced view of media changes as encompassing cultural borrowing, continuities, and smaller fractures in the tradition, and it points to new ways of understanding this moment in the rich interaction between the oral and the textual.