Walter J. Ong on Being Both Backward-Looking and Forward-Looking at the Same Time
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In my 1,900-word review essay "Walter J. Ong on Being Both Backward-Looking and Forward-Looking at the Same Time," I highlight the life and work of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). Then I highlight Ong's generous review of Marshall McLuhan's ambitious 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press), on the one hand, and, on the other, Ong's 1981 article "McLuhan as Teacher: The Future is a Thing of the Past." Then I discuss Robert P. Jones' new 2023 book The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: And the Path to a Shared American Future (Simon & Schuster). In it, Jones criticizes Pope Francis for not being sufficiently backward-looking regarding the Doctrine of Discovery. Finally, I discuss Massimo Faggioli's recent article "The Pope & the Americans: The U.S. episcopate is unparalleled in its resistance to [Pope] Francis" in Commonweal magazine. Faggioli notes that Pope Francis has recently criticized certain conservative American Catholics for being too backward-looking.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".