Now We're Talking
Notes on McLuhan, Ong, and Oral Culture
Why can't we really read anymore? Sure, it's the attention economy, sure it's the phones, sure, it's the information environment—of course. But there's something else I can't quite put my finger on. More than economic or political features, there is a change in the texture of our thinking; in how we gaze out at the world. We are, as Marshall McLuhan predicted, replacing our culture of print for the old oral culture, a mythic culture, a culture more alike to those in the long, preliterate era in human history. And this is necessarily the outcome of our transition to life online.
"...There is nothing subliminal in non-literate cultures. The reason we find myths difficult to grasp is just this fact, that they do not exclude any facet of experience as literate cultures do. All the levels of meaning are simultaneous."
McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
In other words, our post-Internet culture is best understood in the way The Odyssey is understandable—as a spoken-word enterprise. The postmodern character of our thinking is a mirror of preliterate thought, with its admixture of religious beliefs; its angels, its demons, its imps that spoil the milk. What is an influencer, streamer, or podcaster but a bard? Why is it that so many of our ideas, as with Plato or Zhuangzi, are dialogic—conversations in replies and comments and forums and groupchats? Our world has Tiktok dance trends; theirs had dancing sickness.
It is doubly telling that the new battle lines in our politics are as distinguishable by the oral-print divide as they are by material concerns. More so than before, those steeped in the print culture of the university vote one way, and those on the oral Internet vote another. And to win in politics, it seems, it has become necessary to win on vibes, on attention; on podcasts instead of print. The modern politic is overwhelmingly conversational. The practice of flooding the zone is not a winning tactic for quiet, polite, print societies, but for the cacophony of the online agora.
"Sustained thought in an oral culture is tied to communication."
Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982)
These notions of a resurgent oral culture are not new. Famed public intellectual Marshall McLuhan was early to discuss the oral Internet, proclaiming in 1962 that "print culture confers on man a language of thought which leaves him quite unready to face the language of his own electro-magnetic technology." Writing later, priest and professor Walter Ong described the shapes of oral and print cultures—conversational, not objective; circular, not linear; mythic, not profane; embodied, not abstract—noting how the new, electronic orality "has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas." It is a jarring lens to apply to the present; that the print culture, which shaped our minds for abstraction, positivism, the Enlightenment, the Westphalian state, is coming to a close.
Print culture might be a blip in human history, bookended by new cultures of the spoken word. But why are we so happy about it? Much ink has been spilled on the transcendentalism of the global village, celebrating, as Jarvis has, a progressive, Wikipedian existence, a "post-mass-media net built to accommodate many communities, many changing publics that can gather, converse, and act among themselves and in concert with others." But maybe we have overemphasized the global and underemphasized the village. There is a market demand for the village, now, with all its resentment for cathedrals.
"Oral memory works effectively with 'heavy' characters, persons whose deeds are monumental, memorable, and commonly public. Thus the noetic economy of its nature generates outsize figures, that is, heroic figures, not for romantic reasons...but for much more basic reasons: to organize experience in some sort of permanently memorable form. Colorless personalities cannot survive oral mnemonics."
Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982)
The geopolitics of the oral age were terrifying. Memetic fervor turbocharged the peasant rebellions of agrarian China or the Crusades in ways that would make r/wallstreetbets traders blink. Over 20 million died in the incoherent violence of the Taiping rebellion, fought by men who imagined folk gods and Christ in one mind. Those oral societies, preferring "not the soldier, but the brave soldier, not the princess, but the beautiful princess; not the oak, but the sturdy oak", preferred worlds of dragons and great men, religious syncretism and schizophrenic conflict.
We must ask ourselves how the rational-legal infrastructure of nuclear deterrence survives in a mythic era. As Jarvis and others have emphasized, the transition to the Gutenberg age was marked by centuries of religious wars—the possibility of existential ones dramatically changes the stakes. We have not examined what role nuclear weapons play in such a world; perhaps the challenge of our time is managing this cultural megatransition. Or perhaps the AI slop will subvert it all, polluting the global village so much it forces us to live offline a little.
"Thus, in a society still so profoundly oral as Russia, where spying is done by ear and not by eye, at the memorable "purge" trials of the 1930's Westerners expressed bafflement than many confessed total guilt not because of what they had done but what they had thought. In a highly literate society, then, visual and behavioural conformity frees the individual for inner deviation. Not so in an oral society where inner verbailization is effective social action."
McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
There's no space to unpack this all here, all at once. It's not clear how an oral culture will cope with the unprecedented abundance and destructive capacity of today. But to read McLuhan and Ong is to understand what underlies the historical moment; what well-meaning columnists fail to capture in their diagnoses of an electoral realignment or iPad babies. Meme magic, the culture war, and vibe shifts online are best understood by placing yourself in the preliterate village world. Maybe that's why the Internet is obsessed with them—the podcasts, the perverts, the weird medieval guys. We’re villagers now, for better or worse. The question, of course, is how to avoid the consequences.
"For half a millennium, the mediators of media—editors, publishers, producers—controlled the public conversation. Now we may break free of their gatekeeping, agendas, and scarcities—while at the same time risking the loss of the value these institutions have brought in recommending quality, certifying fact, and supporting creativity. What must we create to replace these functions? The internet finally allows individuals to speak and communities of their own definitions to assemble and act, killing the mass at last. I celebrate the closing of the Mass Parenthesis."
Jeff Jarvis, The Gutenberg Parenthesis (2023)
this is so weird and funky i’m into it