The Jesuit scholar of orality and literacy (Orality and Literacy, The Presence of the Word), McLuhan's student and lifelong correspondent, whom Cameron uses less as an author in his own right than as the addressee of McLuhan's revealing letters. Ong enters through McLuhan's 1944 letter on Jung, Thomas, and the church , and returns through a later letter on building a "common sense for the world." The page holds Cameron's reading of the McLuhan–Ong correspondence as a window on McLuhan's own development. New to it — start with dialogue 11.
Across the dialogues
Enters through McLuhan's 1944 letter to Ong — the individual/collective tension Cameron says McLuhan had in mind about Jung and the church
Cameron reads the 1944 letter to Ong as evidence of McLuhan's underlying frame — the ranking of Jung over Aquinas is really about the tension between individual and collective, the theme Cameron says McLuhan carries through his later media work.
"So when McLuhan writes Ong in 1944 and says that Jung may be more important for the church than Thomas, it's that individual collective tension that he has in mind."
Connections
Ong is McLuhan's student and lifelong correspondent; Cameron reads two of McLuhan's letters to him as keys to McLuhan's thinking.