"The Girl Effect" and Walter Ong's "The Man" and "A Man"

After reading Ong's essay I had one thing that stuck out most to me and it was his discussion on Hemingway. I found the section when he is discussing "A man" and "The man" to be oddly intriguing. I say oddly because, before reading this essay I thought this concept was very simple. "This concept" meaning the universal understanding in terms of the language we use in America. Ong says on page 14, "Could readers of an earlier age have managed the Hemingway relationship, the you-and-me relationship, marked by tight-lipped empathy based on shared experience?".  This seems strange to me that he uses Hemingway's writing style as a land mark for a turn in audience. In that, I mean to say that before Hemingway showed the world this tight-lipped way of writing, the writer and reader didn't share a common understanding of things like "The man" or "The mountains". I find this hard to believe. He then goes on to explain it in a way that I didn't truly or fully grasp so I found his argument to fall through a bit. I just think that "The Audience" needs more credit than that, and Hemingway, in the grand scheme of literary writing isn't that old. I mean he died in 1961... Okay I've gotten a bit off track, but that portion relates to what I see in the case studies of "The Girl Effect".

In the first link we were given, ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Vq2mfF8puE ) I immediately thought of "The Girl" in the way that Ong discusses " The Man". I began to, in my head, watch myself watching this video as an audience member. As I was doing this I had two realizations. One was the use of "The" and how there is a common understanding for people who are aware of what happens to these young girls and how that makes me think about them as an audience member. Such as, the director/ editor of this video didn't need to say anything about Africa in the first minute of this video, but as an audience member of whom has an understanding of what happens to young girls in certain regions of Africa, my mind went straight to "this video is going to convince me I need to do something to help these girls in Africa". So, in this case, and how Ong talks about "The" there is a common understanding without given knowledge of what or who the writer is talking about. However, I don't think this works in all cases, because the video had images I could draw conclusions, but in another form of text I may need the information displayed more descriptively to understand... which makes me think that Ong hasn't thought of ALL mediums when he talks about audience. The second realization I had was that in this particular video it dares it's audience to think of these young girls the way that men do in their area. "I dare you to look at me and see only a statistic", I think Ong would break down this video and say, how? How is someone who lives in America or say other developed countries supposed to realistically and totally understand what it's like to be in the shoes of any of the young girls the video displays? Yes, we can attempt to do this, and the persuasion may work in the video. But, I don't think Ong would say that this video works with it's audience on a personal level, and I don't know that it can. This will be a question I phrase in class if there's time, because now Ong has my mind all jumbled up in what it means to be an audience. 

Another aspect that Ong talks about early on in his essay is the reader being a companion with the writer, (pg.11). This I also found interesting because it works and it doesn't work. It works when we assume the reader wants to read about something such as current events, novels, poetry, ect. But, I have a problem believing the reader and writer have a companionship in say, a topic in school that a student has no interest in. If a teacher assigns a reading, yes, the students are then the audience, but the audience then separates to their homes and reads the homework and because individualized by separation. With that comes a sort of anti-companionship with some of the writers audience, because some of the students may read the assignment in a pessimistic way that drives them further away from the writers ideas. I'm not completely sure if that makes total sense, and I think that the writer and reader companionship is an important idea that Ong brings up, I just don't fully agree with it.