I've recently been reading Walter J Ong's book Orality and Literacy, after strong recomendation from Alastair. He did raise some very interesting points about the difference in Culture and ways of thinking between those in Oral and Literate cultures, such as the ideas of accuracy in passing on information. An example is in the area of epic poetry, which often is rarely the same between utterances and many times involves changing rhyming schemes and introducing 'cliches', or recurring themes to describe different characters in an epic poem.

One of the areas which I feel is most relevant to our own society is the difference between literate and illiterate musicians. I know a number of excellent pianists who cannot read music and yet can sometimes reproduce a long piece by ear. It might be interesting to see how they differ in their style and in the way they perceive a piece of music from their literate contemporaries. There does seem to be a similar elitism in the thinking between literate and illiterate musicians as between those in normal language, although I imagine many musicians have lost some of the fluency they could have were they to reject musical literacy. An interesting point that Ong makes is that many non-literates imagine their ability to memorise 'texts' will improve on learning to read, having a written record to prompt them. However, this ability is greatly reduced among literates, leading to a more exact, but less fluent reproduction of the text.