We Need To Talk

Advice for keeping up activity on a blog: don’t get appendicitis in a country where you barely speak the language at the same time that your newborn baby gets his first major daycare illness. Today’s post was commissioned and originally published by the excellent people at Amsterdam-based “platform for internet cultures” The Hmm (shouts out to Sjef and Lilian) as a extension of a talk I gave as part of their Symposihmm on The New Orality. Given the importance of the whirlpool to my theory of contemporary media, this was an excellent opportunity to trace the intellectual history of the metaphor. The main question I ask, here, is: in the neo-oral culture, who’s doing the talking?

Look around, at the present media environment. There is clearly a huge popular demand to listen to people talk. But most academics, myself included, have failed to adapt. The skepticism is understandable; the contemporary media environment is messy, and even worse, from the perspective of the wordcels who have selected into being academics, our mass literary culture has been replaced by a neo-orality.

Perhaps you’ve read about the decline of literary culture, the return to an oral culture? I’ve been writing about this for a few years now, but I’m far from unique in doing so. Andrey Mir has worked this out most systematically, arguing that texting and scrolling have effected a digital reversal of the print regime. Ted Gioia’s widely-circulated State of the Culture, 2024 describes the resulting attention economy bluntly: a dopamine doom loop in which books, essays, and even feature films are outcompeted by fifteen-second bursts of stimulus. And the great L.M. Sacasas has been reading our moment through the lens of orality and literacy for over a decade now.

But what’s the evidence for any of this? I’m a computational social scientist, deeply embedded in the quantitative study of the effects of digital media, and I can tell you: there pretty much isn’t any evidence. At least not that raises to the level of rigor that social scientists demand before we will endorse the claim that something is changing. So we must immediately get reflexive and point out that the language for scientific evidence is itself a concept that only makes sense in the domain of literary culture. Changes of the magnitude we’re describing are impossible to express in the previous language because those changes render that previous language inoperable, unintelligible.

The resonance of this concept of ‘neo-orality’ has sparked novel interest in the work of the media theorist Walter J. Ong, who spoke of the emergence of a ‘secondary orality’. And Ong deserves his flowers; his careful work about the psychodynamics of orality and literacy catalogued the multitudinous and profound ways in which our previous media regime constructed the humans that took part in it, and how those humans are being replaced by new kinds of humans as the media regime changes. It’s difficult to imagine reading through this well-researched text and not coming away convinced by his argument.

Except, of course, that his argument is self-defeating; in the neo-oral culture, nobody is reading careful ethnographic tomes. This is a paradox confronted by all media scholars in the face of the changing world. Our subjectivity and the umwelt in which it was developed were both constructed by the media regime that’s currently crumbling. We can try to observe the near-future–as Ong did, successfully–but the world has already developed far beyond what he could see. To read Ong now is to encounter a prescient picture of the past.

So what do we do? The grand-daddy of media theory, Marshall McLuhan, lays out his method at the very beginning of his career, in the preface to his first book, 1951’s The Mechanical Bride. He invokes Edgar Allan Poe’s story “A Descent into the Maelstrom” as capturing the beginning of modernity and its ever-churning reality. The story involves a sailor who has the misfortune to encounter a ferocious whirlpool that destroys his ship and leaves him tossed about by forces much larger than he can comprehend, let alone control. The sailor watches as his brother, who had been clinging to a piece of flotsam, lets go and attempts to swim against the current, to fight the maelstrom; the brother is of course dragged down into the depths.

The sailor instead maintains his grip on some shred of reality (a plank from the wrecked ship) and then tries to apprehend the entirety of his experience. From an earlier essay that explores the same metaphor (which is traced in more detail here), McLuhan notes that:

“The sailor (…) is at first paralyzed with horror. But in his very paralysis there is another fascination which emerges, a power of detached observation which becomes a ‘scientific’ interest in the action of the strom. And this provides the means of escape.”

Note the scare quotes; this is not the science of precise instruments and grand theories. This is the science of direct observation, of a phenomenological experience of the world as it is. Our human senses remain our most powerful tools for navigating the whirlpool. We just need to pay attention to what is happening, rather than outsourcing our sensemaking to the rationalist entities that are losing their purchase on a declining literary world. That is,

“Either we penetrate to the essential character of man and society and discover the outlines of a world order, or we continue as flotsam and jetsam on a flood of transient fads and ideas that will drown us with impartiality. It is here suggested that the outlines of world order are already quite visible to the student of the swirling flood…”

There’s a leitmotif in the history of media theory that’s worth exploring: these guys were mostly all seriously religious, in book-based religions. McLuhan was one of those most intense, intellectual Catholics–a convert. Ong was a Jesuit priest. Flusser was deeply invested in Jewish thought. A consequence is that these ‘media ecologists’ are often described as (or rather accused of) being conservative. This is true in practice; the step of insisting on the primacy of the human body comes most naturally when you believe that the body is the product of divine, intelligent design. This tradition has recently been re-invigorated by the papal encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (a kind of theological essay released by the pope), re-asserting the centrality of the human and especially the human body in the age of AI.

The image from McLuhan and Fiore’s 1967 The Medium is the Massage communicates the vibe better than text alone ever could. We can pin down the intuition of what the original ‘oral culture’ looked like, just how embodied the previous media environment really was. This is necessarily an exoticizing and in this case racialized exercise; the past is a foreign country, but McLuhan and Fiore use a photograph of what we’re told to call a ‘village’, in which it seems a charismatic storyteller is holding his audience rapt, engaging in the central media technology of an oral culture: talking.

McLuhan highlights another element of the Poe short story: humor.

“‘I must have been delirious, for I even sought amusement in speculation upon the relative velocities of their several descents towards the foam below.’ It was this amusement born of his rational detachment as a spectator of his own situation that gave him the thread which led him out of the Labyrinth. And it is in the same spirit that this book is offered as an amusement. Many who are accustomed to the note of moral indignation will mistake this amusement for mere indifference. But the time for anger and protest is in the early stages of a new process. The present stage is extremely advanced.” (emphasis in the original quote)

I submit that we’ve been trying the moral indignation for a while now, and that it doesn’t seem to work. Instead, in the spirit of amusement, I want to establish the attention to seemingly trivial jokes, internet memes, as key to understanding our current environment. For example: a plausible but mistaken response to arguments for the emergence of a neo-orality is the claim that we are currently awash in text. Perhaps the text that most people read doesn’t come in the form of academic monographs or papal encyclicals, but microblogs flourish and there are captions and comments attending to even the most audiovisual platforms like Instagram or TikTok. Attention to memes reveals how the spirit of orality is redefining the use of text. An oral culture that prioritizes affect and vibe over literary values like rationality and precision chafes against the medium of text, re-making the text as a neo-oral technology. Text can’t communicate vibes, except explicitly:

This is just one example. There’s plenty of work to be done by everyone who uses the internet and wants to think about how to do it differently. McLuhan’s method is open to all. But maps can still be useful, so here’s a written taxonomy that I hope can call attention to the relevant dimensions of our culture.

Read down the columns and the logic of each world comes into focus. For example, in oral culture, identity is a matter of charisma and anonymity. Authority flows from lineage and the elder, and the characteristic effect is eternal return–the same stories and the same seasons, forever. In literary culture the self becomes individual and Cartesian. Authority migrates to the credential and the citation and the canon, and the characteristic effect is the line: progress, sequence, history going somewhere. In digital orality, identity is networked and platformed. Authority is vibes and the characteristic effect is neither circle nor line, but intensification. Everything simply gets more so. MrBeast provides a perfect example: his videos do not have any point except to maximize viewership; the viewership he has accrued allows him greater fame and resources to pour into the next video. He is a creator without creative vision, and is in fact better understood as a creation of audience feedback filtered through the YouTube Apparatus.

This is why the first step has to be a step back (der Schritt zurück, if you’re into that sort of thing). A step towards the stability of the body and our capacity to directly observe the world. Any action within the whirlpool will only draw us deeper in unless we have taken the time to understand what is happening, to (in McLuhan’s words) “penetrate to the essential character of man and society and discover the outlines of a world order.”

It’s tempting to attempt to step back into the past, to try to resuscitate the dying literary culture. Would that it were possible! But this direction produces such category errors as the focus on ‘misinformation’ as a problem. This is a literary concept applied to the neo-oral order, which is in fact premised on non-information, in the sense that facticity is overtaken by vibes as a criterion for evaluation.

Amused, detached observation is the most important method, from which others will emerge. But if I may point in a direction that strikes me as promising: the values of the literary world that we might want to preserve can only be salvaged through the development of a genuine digital literacy to counterbalance the ascendent digital orality. This doesn’t mean trying to influence the digital world with the technology of writing. It means trying to influence the digital world with the technology of digital writing, that is, code. Code is writing in the native language of the internet, and I am optimistic that LLMs represent a democratization of this capacity. A newfound ability to translate your thoughts into the language of the computer.