A major concern of Ong's works is the impact that the shift from orality to literacy has had on culture and education. Writing is a technology like other technologies (fire, the steam engine, etc.) that, when introduced to a "primary oral culture" (which has never known writing) has extremely wide-ranging impacts in all areas of life. These include culture, economics, politics, art, and more. Furthermore, even a small amount of education in writing transforms people's mentality from the holistic immersion of orality to interiorization and individuation.

Many of the effects of the introduction of the technology of writing are related to the fact that oral cultures require strategies of preserving information in the absence of writing. These include, for example, a reliance on proverbs or condensed wisdom for making decisions, epic poetry, and stylized culture heroes (wise Nestor, crafty Odysseus). Writing makes these features no longer necessary, and introduces new strategies of remembering cultural material, which itself now changes.

Because cultures at any given time vary along a continuum between full orality and full literacy, Ong distinguishes between primary oral cultures (which have never known writing), cultures with craft literacy (such as scribes), and cultures in a transition phase from orality to literacy, in which some people know of writing but are illiterate - these cultures have "residual orality".

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