Walter Ong

(1912 - 2003)

Born in Kansas City, the Jesuit priest Walter Ong studied under Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who supervised Ong’s master’s thesis on Gerard Manley Hopkins, and was a longtime professor of English at St. Louis University. His work often considered how humans were shaped by technological innovations throughout history; his last article, titled “Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today’s Computers,” was published in 1998.