Walter Ong’s trenchant reflections on the history of communication helped to lay the groundwork for an understanding of Post-Modern media culture. For more than half a century, the American Jesuit priest demonstrated how various forms of communication — from storytelling to manuscripts and the internet — transformed thought, relationships and cultures. His work brought together innovative ideas in literature, anthropology, philosophy, theology and psychology, and his observations on the development of oral culture were used to analyse many levels of communication, from New York subway graffiti to African drum talk and Martin Luther King’s speeches.

In the last decade of his life, Ong was frequently grouped with leading PostModern theorists, such as Jacques Derrida, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault and Hélène Cixous. But he differed from them in crucial respects. He disliked the label “theorist” and preferred to describe his work as just saying “how things are”. As a Roman Catholic priest, he shunned the moral relativism prevalent in PostModern intellectual circles, and his work always pointed to the presence of an ineffable God and the interconnectedness of the evolving Universe.

In his highly regarded book Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word (1982), he explored the development of communication from its preliterate origins to its current dependence on electronic media. He was fascinated by the shift from one mode of communication to another. He used classical narratives, such as Homer’s Odyssey to demonstrate that preliterate cultures relied on “oral thought”, in which the narrator might contradict himself and the story could evolve until it was written down. He contrasted the thinking and verbal communication of oral cultures — which he termed “primary orality” — with the written tradition, using the works of Plato and Aristotle to illustrate the change. He argued that a written text relies on a set of basic rules for logical reasoning, as well as a consistent use of terms, to communicate information. Both oral and written traditions influence cultural values, he suggested, but while an oral society places a high value on communal memory, a literate one focuses on individual reasoning and introspection.

He believed that the development and diffusion of manufactured sound, through radio, television and compact discs, marked a new stage in human culture, which he styled “secondary orality”. This new phase is oral because it is based on sound-communication, but unlike primary orality it uses artificial sound made by machines, developed only with the help of writing. Secondary oral cultures can address millions of people simultaneously, in contrast to primary oral cultures, which address small, homogenous groups. In his final years, Ong saw a revival of interest in his work, as scholars grappled with the implications of the digital revolution. His ideas were commonly held to have anticipated the radical changes in global communications triggered by the internet.

Walter Jackson Ong was born in Kansas City, and knew he wanted to be a priest from the time he was in high school. He graduated at 16, then studied Latin at Rockhurst College. He worked in printing and publishing before entering the Society of Jesus in 1935, and then took a master’s degree in English at St Louis University, Missouri, and later a licentiate in philosophy and theology.

His thesis was supervised by Marshall McLuhan, whose interest in communication history inspired Ong to pursue his own research. McLuhan became a pop culture guru in the 1960s, but Ong remained a scholar’s scholar. His writing style was dense and difficult (his English lectures were nicknamed “Onglish” by perplexed students), but he was often cited, not least by McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962).

Ong was ordained in 1946, and in 1955 he earned a doctorate in English at Harvard University with a dissertation on the French Renaissance philosopher Peter Ramus. He returned to the English department at St Louis, where he spent most of his teaching career until his retirement in 1991. A chair in humanities is now named after him.

Ong’s many books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. His works include Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958), The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1967), and Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness (1981).

In 1963 the French Government appointed him Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. He served on the White House task force on education in 1967 under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and was a member of the National Council of the Humanities from 1968 to 1974 and co-chair of the Advisory Committee on Science, Technology and Human Values from 1974 to 1978. In 1978 he was elected president of the Modern Language Association of America, the largest scholarly society in the world.

Despite Ong’s academic achievements, he was primarily a priest. He said daily Mass at 5:30am, heard confessions, and wore clerical dress wherever he went. In his spare time, he enjoyed fly-fishing, lizard-spotting and caring for the houseplants in Jesuit Hall.

Ong had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for several years.

Father Walter J. Ong, historian of communications and Roman Catholic priest, was born on November 30, 1912. He died on August 12, 2003, aged 90.