Back to Orality

Humanities and Social Science
1

The idea, not an original one of mine, is that mass literacy may turn out to have been a historical blip, and orality the enduring form of knowledge and culture. At least, this seems likely to be the case if we mean literacy in the strong sense, referring to membership in a culture mediated primarily through text, especially books.

When I was a child, we had some bookshelves, and one of the books was the Reader’s Digest Complete DIY Manual:

image
image1080×810 228 KB

But now when I want to fix the leaking tap or repair that hole in the wall, I turn to YouTube. Literacy here is mostly skipped—even the minimal and instrumental typing of a search term can now be avoided with voice recognition—in favour of an oral transfer of information. Same as it ever was—until the 19th century. Human society is returning to its ancient default, in which the transmission of knowledge, skills, and culture went through voice, gesture, and imitation.

And note my mention just now of culture; this phenomenon obviously isn’t confined to DIY. Reading for its own sake—for pleasure, intellectual stimulation, as an encounter with art and ideas—has been in decline for decades, its place taken first by television and now increasingly by the new media.

The neutral observation that civilization is returning to normality is quite attractive, in the way it refuses the grumpy old man attitude, but I’m also deeply resistant. I’m preaching to the converted here, but: didn’t we make something great and worth preserving when we made it possible to write down a thought, walk away, and come back later to pick it apart—to hold an argument in place long enough to find the holes in it, instead of losing it the moment the voice stops?

Do you think a return to orality is good, bad, or neither? Does it depend on what kind of orality it is? How will this situation develop over the next few decades?

NOTE: The key text, which I haven’t read, is Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, published in 1982. Compared to what’s going on now, the return to orality at the time was relatively mild, occuring through TV and radio.

3 Likes
2

ADDENDUM: That this has been enabled by the Internet may have come as a surprise to those who thought that the web, as a basically text-based medium, would extend literacy even further.

3

I think literacy will become an elite thing. The difference will be like vibecoding and actual programming.

4

Yes its interesting. I’m not particularly keen on print. I like podcasts, lectures audiobooks but the written word remains essential to my work which is administrative.

1 Like
5

An interesting topic, an interesting perspective to ponder.

Indeed, writing is dying out, if you look at it from the perspective you presented. I also have a personal pain point: writing skills used to be much more valuable in my work. I was good at writing procedural documents, and that was essential when applying for a job. Now, AI has leveled that out. It writes better than me… Unfortunately… In everything. Except, perhaps, for some purely human quirks, which I have to carefully study and look for in philosophy. That at least keeps me afloat.

I’m observing modern company correspondence: An accountant provides an extract from the Tax Code with an AI-generated commentary, a marketer comments on her commentary with AI-generated words, and a financier provides an AI-generated conclusion. I think it’s not hard to tell the difference.

Then these long texts (as we all know, AI loves to describe everything in detail) come to me, and I have to reread them all… More often than not (when it’s not about something significant), I continue this chain. I send it all straight to the AI, which will sift through it according to my instructions.

All this makes things easier, faster, etc. It’s clear why all this happens. And I would add to your text that our AI, which deftly juggles words, has made the situation worse.

But here’s something else I’ve personally noticed. When I need to do something around the house, I also look for instructions on YouTube. But videos that spend 15-30 minutes explaining how to tighten a single bolt put me off. It’s better when the solution to my problem is contained in 30 seconds. I don’t even care what they say; let them just show me.

You also talk about returning to words instead of text. I’d add that words aren’t really necessary.

At large company board meetings where people gather to give presentations, people have become increasingly intolerant of long stories or tedious presentations. Behind the scenes, the sentiment is something like, “Dude, keep it short. I can generate all this on my phone.”

But what’s truly important, what truly matters at such meetings, is the participants’ personal experiences with the topic being discussed. Personal experience. And the decision that will then be made. A choice. Which occurs outside of an algorithm, which remains human.

So, from my perspective, I’d take an even broader look at your concerns about the disappearance of text. It seems something more is going on.

1 Like
6

Some of the best craftsman can barely use email, or read construction drawings. They typically suck at text messaging, e.g. a standard response to any question or topic is a “thumbs-up-icon”. Almost all communication I’ve had with plumbers, carpenters, concrete workers etc is by voice. Often combined with gestures and exemples. Also professional craftsmen watch Youtube videos. But I don’t think their disinterest in text or symbolic drawings means going back to an oral culture. Craftsman have always sucked at symbol shuffling. They’re focused on construction.

Without inscriptions or pictures in forms that reliably preserve knowledge over time, we’re doomed.

If you slice a section vertically through a modern city block, approximately 25% of that section will probably consist of a terrible tangle of pipes, shafts, cords, and technology. None of that can be maintained without preserved documentation, drawings, rules, building codes etc. Urban life as we know it would be impossible.

1 Like
7

@Jamal An interesting idea which I’ve also pondered in recent years. I have no real position on it, but I think I kind of like it. Perhaps because I’ve never read instructions in my life, but I have watched how-tos YouTube.

I’m particularly curious in how this might affect philosophy. I wonder how the ideas of people like Derrida would fare in an orality. Or Heidegger’s. Are there certain types of philosophical thinking that depend on written language and the specific interplay of pages for their full comprehension?

I imagine some thinkers can be broken down into a series of fairly simple verbal statements. But others seem to require the lucubration that only words, sentences and pages can afford. Thoughts?

8

I think this may be largely mythical. I’ve attended numerous board meetings, and board papers are a necessary requirement for meeting corporate standards. You never just talk. These papers are often lengthy and complex, and must be read by board members, who are in fact liable for the company’s mistakes. This means boards can be very much in the detail, unless they are being irresponsible. No doubt this varies around the world and from company to company. When you present a paper at a board committee meeting, you are expected to succinctly represent the facts in the paper, but you may be cross-examined for 30 minutes and are expected to reproduce great detail based on the written content.

9

“I heard a nightingale sing, but I didn’t like it.”
“It sounds like a myth, because I heard an eagle cry, and the mice hid.”

Agreed, Tom_Storm. You’ve got me.

But this is truly important. A document with a signature. It’s roughly equivalent to what the thread’s author was talking about: “A text to refer back to.” Writing is still necessary, at least for this purpose. It still prevents empty rhetoric.

10

I pretty much agree with the thesis though the academic discourse tends to acknowledge multiple literacies, so some theorists might object that there’s just a shifting rather than a loss. Still, that view itself might be politically infected. Anyhow, a resonant contemprory theoretical strand might be Stiegler’s long circuits of individuation vs short circuits of media. There seems to be a qualitative difference there in terms of the cognitive.

When we read, particularly, difficult material, we are forced to or forcefully embed ourselves in language in a way that develops internal thought relations differently to the more rudimentary process of imitation. I’m not sure though how much we can pin this to the mode (written) vs the form and content (the spoken / visual) seeing as both can vary in complexity. However there are generalizable recognized differences. For example written language tends to be more conceptually condensed through nominalization—we pack more in to noun phrases as a tradeoff for the luxury of being able to pause and unpack them.

Further, on a social level, it might not amount just to a dumbing down of content, but a shift in the baseline mode of delivery that inevitably results in such. That’s the scary part and could be positied in terms of commercial imperative: The written word is a harder sell and a harder medium through which to sell. It’s much more efficent economically to have us all pinned to something that both inheres greater stimulative effect (add viduals) and stops us slowing down to reflect (the natural effect of the contrast in level of nominalsisation between spoken and written content).

If we accept social progress now is essentially a function of economic growth (the now universalized measure of socio-political success) then the continued degradation of literacy in the traditional sense seems inevitable.

1 Like
11

It’s not just Derrida and Heidegger. We can go all the way back to Socrates, who wouldn’t even be Socrates were it not for Plato’s texts.

But that takes us away from mass literacy. Maybe it’s not just that, as @Thrifclyfe suggests, literacy will become the preserve of an elite, but that it always has been, and it tells us little about what everyone else is doing. If everyday cultural life moves back to the oral default, the conceptually dense textual thinking described by @Baden might well persist anyway, in the same way that the scribes persisted through the largely oral medieval period, i.e., as a shrinking specialist enclave rather than a general cultural inheritance. The point is that the presumption of 19th and 20th century liberals (and not only liberals) that literacy just is (or will be) the basic mode of a general society-wide cultural inheritance has turned out to be a vast overestimation of a transient phenomenon.

1 Like
12

“better than I” (as AI would have phrased it) :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

13

Is what we are doing here oral or written?

I usually type, but sometimes use voice recognition, especially when using my phone: that tiny keyboard is almost useless.

But the posts are almost always read, the only exception being when folk post videos that are done by someone else.

14

Sounds plausible. I can’t say this concerns me too much, but I’d be interested to understand what this would actually mean for human life, meaning and conduct.

15

It seems that way to me. I think philosophy is about arranging our words and also about having fundamental stances. An interesting thinker is a word artist. As much poet as logician. Much of his truth is there in the arrangement of the words.

1 Like
16

Yes, so in using “orality” what I’m doing is focusing on one aspect of what is actually something wider: direct, face-to-face (or screen-to-face) transmission of knowledge and skill, of which spoken language is only the most obvious channel. It’s not only the spoken language aspect that characterizes what I’ve called the ancient default. That’s why—I realize now—I mentioned imitation:

One possibly silly interpretation of this is a radicalization of the idea: that it’s not just literacy that is being bypassed, but language itself in any form. This would not only be an ancient default, but a paleolithic one.

1 Like
17

It’s interesting to speculatively trace how that would work since it portrays a kind of paradoxical bifurcation in the symbolic between language and technique. As language becomes more efficient, more subject to technique—the abstract code behind physically instantiated technology—we need less of it; and, in needing less of it, we become cognitively simpler, less reflective, more reactive, more reliant on technique / technology in a self-stroking cycle (@Astorre’s anecdote about preferring 30 second videos for routine repeairs (and who wouldn’t really?) paints this in microcosm).

This would suggest control of the symbolic passes more and more into the hands of technique, which itself is a kind of meta-code. So, in a sense language being bypassed is the language / human binary being superceded by the higher level meta-code of technique, which is abstract like language but purely functional rather than aesthetic. So what disappears actually is anything that does not serve technique as instantiated through technology.

Of course, then we might ask, function towards what? And we can appeal to autopoiesis and say towards producing more of itself. But where autopoiesis requires a bounded physical object and the environment in a mutual relation (shades of my recent Deleuze conversation), what is reproduced primarily here are the relations with their physical instantiation in technologies the secondary means of making them real.

This also boils down to the symbolic reaching across the sentient to the physical and filtering out the middle man in order to more efficently use the physical to make more of itself. Technique would then be the “soul” or organizing principle of a non-sentient process which destroys the (human) “soul”, reducing it back towards animality (physical/setient) as the symbolic leaves it behind for greener (more efficient) pastures.

And AI is the obvious vehicle here in which the symbolic can escape the sentient.

Well, you wanted to get radical didn’t you?

18

Either way it gets ‘written down, into literature’, as some might say.

19

It has been said that literature has been for at least 3,500 years, and with the invent of computers and the internet human knowledge being placed into literature might well be growing and/or be around for longer than it has existed so far, to when this is being written.

20

Then let’s take this to a radically absurd level.

Look, if we go all the way, technology could become not just a mediator, but simultaneously an assistant to thought itself, a means of embodiment, and a way to transmit data directly to an object.

Look at Musk’s developments and his Neurolank. This is exactly what we’re talking about: a person sits in a chair and controls a computer with their thoughts. The main problem with such systems today is the connection problem. The connection between the electrode and the brain eventually breaks down and dies (limiting biological tissue death). What if they solve this problem? You just need to directly think about the action, and it will happen (with the help of technology).

The brain no longer needs words, not even images; everything will happen before the image itself is imagined. It’s something like moving an arm or a leg—we don’t imagine the movement before the actual movement…

In general, the steps toward such an outcome are becoming fewer and fewer. One can only hope that people will wake up sooner from Musk’s propaganda and fairy tales about helping the disabled, dressed up as humanitarianism.

I think it turned out even more radical =)

1 Like