Literacy theorist Walter Ong compares orality and literacy as distinct worldviews. He sees oral rhetoric as embodied, concrete, aggregative and communal. The rhetoric of literate cultures, however, is disembodied, abstract, hierarchical, and individual in focus. This dissertation postulates a theory of cyberdiscursivity, which holds that the more instantaneous, widespread, and individual discursive practices inherent in computer-mediated communication (CMC) change the production, use, and conceptualization of texts in ways similar to those above, rendering the familiar standards of print texuality only tangentially applicable to cybertexts.
    Chapter I conceptualizes cyberdiscursivity by offering a history of discourse focusing on the orality/literacy question via rhetorical and critical theory. The next four chapters recount Ong's characteristics of orality and literacy and then extend Ong's elements of oral and literate cultures to CMC culture. First, where oral rhetoric is embodied and literacy is disembodied, a cyberdiscursive rhetoric is virtual, characterized by remotely centered interactivity and instantaneousness. The next chapter details how the concrete rhetoric of orality and abstract rhetoric of literacy become dynamic in cyberdiscursivity via the continuous, productive nature created by virtuality and user agency. The subject of Chapter IV is the way in which oral rhetoric's aggregative structure and literacy's hierarchical structure give way to an emergent structure in CMC, pieced together by a user who does not recognize a structure until it develops before her through a random choice of fragments which seldom, if ever, remain cohesive, and which usually become impossible to trace.  The fifth chapter demonstrates how the communal nature of oral rhetoric and the individual nature of literacy move toward an idiosyncratic rhetoric in which reader/user agency transforms the textual experience into an epistemologically challenging game which shatters rules as basic to print texts as one word following another. These elements underlying Chapters II-V are abstracted in a table below.  A conclusions chapter then combines the elements of cyberdiscursivity into a theoretical whole, the purpose of which is to provide a viewpoint for the future evaluation of CMC as a controlling cultural medium.

Table 1: Elements of Orality, Literacy, and Cyberdiscursivity (p. 8)