While reading “Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought” by Walter Ong I continued to compare strictly oral language cultures to cultures with a written language, as we have been for a while. One part that really sparked my attention was when Ong referenced a video that he saw about a missionary linguist working with a community in the South Pacific. He said he “witnessed her difficulty in convincing the speakers of the language that she could write down their utterances. They believed that only the languages they knew as written, such as English or French, could be written.” This got me thinking about how power could and did play a role in the evolution of spoken languages to written. Are the languages we know as spoken and written today that way because those cultures had the power and resources to develop a written equivalent? Do cultures without a written language believe that it is because their ideas are not as important as those of Europeans or powerful societies? How does power and privilege play in to the writing systems of languages, or lack thereof?
One Paige At a Time 
I agree that power plays into subtle (and not so subtle) biases about the type of knowledge a certain culture can bring to the table. Just look at our educational system: we still privilege Western thought, writing, literature. When I was in grad school learning about rhetoric, we had one day on Chinese rhetoric and none on African American rhetoric (which both have rich rhetorical traditions). This is changing, but change is incredibly slow.
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