Secondary Orality and an "unoral" setting

From page 134-135 of Ong:

Our culture has now developed into "secondary orality" according to Ong. Secondary orality, like primary orality, generates strong groups sense because listening to words forms hearers into a group or an audience. But secondary orality also, unlike primary orality, generates a sense for a groups immeasurably larger than those of primary oral culture. This is described by Marshall McLuhan's "global village". Also, I was asking my dad, with regards to the economy, what has changed about entrepreneurialship. Dad said that in the 80's and early 90's people only competed locally, but now we compete globally. It's harder to get a good deal or bargain these days because people know too much, there's so much information. Like Nietzche says, were all walking dictionaries, which certainly leads to a sense of alienation. Anyways, continuing with Ong, he says that as a result of being part of a global villiage, that the individual must be "socially sensitive", like those All State Insurance commercials that show people doing good deeds. Ong says that "we are turned outward because we have turned inward," and that "orality promotes spontaneity because through analytic reflection we have decided that spontaneity is a good thing." I couldn't agree more, and this works very much along the lines of post modern thinking, which believes that we are told to act spontaneously by simulacra.

Ong uses presidential debates as an example to support is claim about the differences between orality of today (secondary), and orality of yesterday (primary). Radio and television, Ong explains, has brought "political figures as public speakers to a larger public than was ever possible before modern electronic developments." But Ong doesn't think that these debates are in the old oral tradition like the antagonistic Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Instead, modern presidential combatants, rather than speaking out of the primary oral style which made itself additive, redundant, carefully balanced, and highly agonistic with intense interplay between speaker and audience, do the opposite. Ong says "the audience is absent, invisible, inaudible. The candidates are ensconced in tight little booths, make short presentations, and engage in crisp little conversations with each other in which any agonisitic edge is deliberately kept dull. Electonic media do not tolerate a show of open antagonism."

Of course there are possible arguments, exeptions and additions to Ong's supposition. Obama's innaguration speech used addition and parataxis of the old oral tradition and I'm sure someone could make some sort of argument about reality t.v., which can be antagonistic and only appear to be spontaneous.