There is no upside-down until you learn to read and write: psychol-
ogists have at least shown this. Until you learn to read and write and
notice letters on a line right-side up, there is no horizontal or vertical
axis in the visible world. Cave painters used no horizontal or visual
axis. They painted. They would be just as happy painting on this
microphone head as anywhere else, such as back here or under here,
and they painted one picture on top of another and all around -- like
the levels of meaning in Scriptural study in the Middle Ages. There
was no question that one meaning should follow another; they were
all together, all over the place, all through each other.
	The pre-literate man lives in a world that is auditory in that way.
Everything penetrates everything else. Everything is at once. He doesn’t
sort things out and put them in places; he lives in an all-at-once world
because he lives by ear. It’s only after long periods of literacy that
people begin to trust their eyes and begin to follow the structure of
planes and lines and lines of force that the eyes experience. The eye is
to the pre-literate man a very inferior organ.
	Likewise, I think that you’ll find that the average student today
regards the classroom as a very inferior means of experience and not
as a possible source of order at all. So when you present him with a
curriculum structured visually, with subjects ordered side by side each in
its special compartment, and that follow one another, I think you’ll find
exactly zero results in teaching. Don’t ask me if this is a "bad thing". It
is a very "bad thing" for us who have been trained in a visual order,
but then we wouldn’t survive five minutes in a thirteenth-century
classroom. We couldn’t cope with their ways of handling experience
in a rush, everything at once, every facet, all sides -- the total ency-
clopedia of knowledge all at once.
	The sixteenth-century humanist, after a century of print, turned on
the schoolman and said "Words, words, words, words . . . shut up!"
because, after reading print for a century he had come to think of
words as following each other distinctly, visually. The schoolman had
become to him an absolutely grotesque character, a barbarian who just
yattered and nattered on and on. Such, within a hundred years of
Gutenberg, was the normal reaction of the humanist to the auditory
man.
	The sixteenth-century discovery that there was such a thing as
visual order has been the subject of much comment by Fr. Walter Ong
in his recent works, particularly in his Ramus, Method and the Decay of
Dialogue. He details the rise of this visual habit of ordering knowledge
and the consequent decay of dialogue in forms of instruction and forms
of learning. To come back to our own time: a form like this micro-
phone has brought back dialogue in familiar forms like panels and
round-tables and so on. The very fact that we’re here, talking in this
way, testifies to the power of this thing in the community at large.

from p.41 of "Communication Media: Makers of the Modern World"
in the MEDIUM AND THE LIGHT : 33-44

The original delivery of this text is characterised in the
following footnote from page 33:
*Lightly edited transcript of an informal address, given at the twelfth annual
Seminarians’ Conference, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto,
29-31 August 1959, and published in the volume, Communications and
the Word of God, by St. Michael’s College, pages 9-22.