The Return of Oral Culture

Walter Ong, Neil Postman, and our new, high-tech oral culture.

The complex civilisation that we inhabit today is the product of one technology above all others: the written word. The last two centuries saw the unique advent of mass literacy, as increasingly complex societies sought to standardise the beliefs and mental habits of their citizenry. Long-form reading of the type embodied in books, essays, and magazines functioned as a cultural and psychological training regime used by institutions to produce certain types of minds and citizens.

The printed word gradually displaced the older mental and cultural habits of oral culture, as developed societies moved towards universal literacy. Oral culture was no less complex or intelligent in its own way, and the shift from one system to another did not imply a moral judgement. But people habituated to transmitting information through oral forms of discourse experienced the world in a fundamentally different way: treating the sharing of knowledge as something personal and communal, reasoning situationally, and eschewing the abstract logic that writing made possible.

Mass literacy reshaped how modern people argued, how they conceived of truth, how they evaluated political authority, and how they even judged what it meant to be considered intelligent. To become “literate” did not merely mean learning to decode marks on a page, or even to read short pieces of text instrumentally. It meant entering a civilisation built around long stretches of linear attention, quiet interiority, and the gradual construction of complex, impersonal structures of meaning that could be shared with others.

That civilisation is now in the process of unwinding. With its passage, we are now seeing a monumental cultural shift occur almost entirely unremarked: the return of oral culture, in a new technological form.

The Return of Homo Oralis

The decline in reading books and magazines is attested by statistical surveys and is also obvious to anyone observing popular social habits over the past few decades. The written word is losing its place of cultural centrality in favour of fundamentally oral forms of communication transmitted through personalised video and audio. The shift is not merely cultural but metaphysical. We are witnessing, unremarked, the decline of a certain kind of human being: the reflective, slow thinker, who can sit with difficulty.

Books demand a kind of cognitive posture that increasingly feels unnatural to many people. The result is not just lower reading comprehension—which teachers are reporting in students even in some elite colleges—but a different sense of what knowledge even is: something we are habituated to expect instantly, rather than that which makes itself accessible slowly.

Technology is returning us to a universe of instantaneous imagery and sound typical of oral culture. Even the bursts of unstructured text characteristic of social media timelines and text messages—the common “reading” done in an overstimulated communication environment—is expressed in the ad hoc staccato of oral culture.

Our brains themselves are changing in response to this stimulus. Instead of interior lives inclined toward the complex, structured reasoning that characterised mass-literate civilisation, we are developing minds optimised for speed, emotiveness, responsiveness, and public performance. As we change, our civilisation must as well. Democracy was built for a republic of letters, and whether it can survive in its current form through this shift is questionable. But recognising that it is taking place is the necessary basis for any response.

Two men who lived through and died in the early phases of our current technological explosion—Walter J. Ong and Neil Postman—anticipated the transformation back to an oral culture with remarkable clarity. Ong was a Jesuit priest, literary scholar, and historian of communication whose work traced how technologies like writing and print reshaped human thought. Postman was a media theorist and educator, best known for his critiques of television and technological culture.

Writing at the dawn of the cable news age, Postman warned that modern societies were increasingly confusing information with wisdom. He also described the passage from a print-based public sphere to a television-based one (a powerful form of oral media) as a collapse of rational civic discourse into frivolous entertainment masquerading as knowledge.

Ong went even further, describing the difference between oral and literate worlds as a shift in human consciousness itself. Ong was careful to point out that orality was not an “inferior” stage preceding literacy, but a distinct mode of human existence with its own strengths. Primary oral cultures—societies with no writing at all—are highly intelligent. But their intelligence manifests differently, giving rise to distinct types of societies.

Had Postman and Ong lived today, they would recognise what has been taking place with the pervasive growth of internet video as the full rebirth of oral culture armed with the technological tools of modern society. The slow-reasoning republic of letters that gave birth to the organisational forms of modern society is rapidly fading in the face of ever more pervasive algorithmic video and audio mediums. Every technology has a particular bias, and the bias of these mediums is to instil an inclination in people for the performative, conflict-driven, impulsive style of the spoken word.

To understand the implications of this change, we have to understand how literate culture changed human psychology in the first place. The printed book and the long-form essay were technologies that organised stories, ideas, and debates into unfolding chronological sequences. A mind habituated to books demotes instant gratification in favour of order and hierarchies of knowledge. Long-form reading is the discipline of learning to follow an idea through time without interruption, and ultimately learning how to structure meaning itself.

To finish a book from beginning to end, an individual must hold multiple ideas in mind and compare and integrate them over an extended period. It also required dealing heavily in abstract categories and accepting a degree of irreducible complexity. Literacy taught the masses these mental habits, none of which came naturally.

Ong, in his classic work, Orality and Literacy, treated literacy not as an add-on skill but as a transformation of psychology. “Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form,” he wrote. “More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.”

He also differentiated between primary orality—the worldview and communicative style of societies with no knowledge of writing at all—and secondary orality, where people are familiar with text, and may even be able to read themselves, but do not primarily receive or transmit information that way. The latter is the form of the modern oral culture produced by electronic media.

Statistics attest to the exploding popularity of video-based media over long-form text—a long triumph that began with the emergence of television and is now culminating in mass personalised short-form video. The shift from relying on newspapers as the default way of absorbing information to consuming video streams changes one’s mental habits and even neurology. In many ways, the changes mirror those that take place between literate and oral cultures.

The act of writing and reading is about externalising an individual’s memory and storing it in a physical artefact, rather than, say, in a community of storytellers or a tradition of memorised aphorisms. A written text is static, cannot argue back against its reader, and allows for the careful development of concepts and building of knowledge with minimal distortion. It also allows for the articulation of abstract generalisations that are difficult to conceive for a mind habituated to purely verbal communication. A reader is not distracted by the voice, personality, or physical appearance of the writer themselves, and can be left to examine their ideas under the glare of cold rationality.

Because words spoken vanish as soon as they are spoken, oral cultures had to organise knowledge differently: optimising for memorisation, repetition, and social impact. Unlike text, which tends towards the abstract, oral expression also has greater proximity to direct human experience and is designed to spike emotion. Unlike writing, speaking itself is a direct “act.” Oral cultures are participatory and encourage individuals to engage in situational instead of detached reasoning. They also tend to produce verbal contests, boasting, insults, and status struggles in public life. These are modes of expression that remain alive in oral cultural products such as poetry slams, freestyle rap battles, and even social media flame wars.

A culture of letters first gave rise to a literate, undemocratic elite class that engaged in intellectual exchange among themselves while ruling over an orally based public that was not involved in decision-making. The printed page of mass society—birthed by the invention of the Gutenberg Press—was a revolution that created the complex mass civilisation upon whose remnants we now inhabit.

Mass literacy produced books, essays, and daily newspapers, providing a stable reference point shared by thousands or millions of people and, for the first time, enabling a kind of shared public rationality that also supported modern conceptions of national identity.

Postman argued that print culture was the foundation of serious politics in the United States and other modern democracies. He famously contrasted the print-based world of the 18th and 19th centuries—where citizens read pamphlets, followed long debates, and judged leaders by their command of language—with the cable television of his time, where politics was rapidly transforming into image-driven performance.

The social media age has propelled us much further down that road, shaping a public defined less by sustained reasoning and attention than by rapid emotional reactions.

As Postman argued, different technologies privileged different epistemologies and manners of expression. A print-based public expects leaders to speak in full paragraphs and explain their ideas with verifiable logic. They will prioritise less the way politicians look and perform in public, and more the content of their speech. In contrast, an oral public expects rhythmic slogans, attractive visuals, and, above all, in a public sphere controlled by corporate television and social media algorithms, the feeling of being entertained.

Whereas in the literate world, the public sphere expected political communication to look and sound like essays, debates, editorials—all of which are designed to be reasoned through—oral media like short-form video instead produce politics as a vivid emotional atmosphere. The goal is not to persuade the public but to dominate them through emotional capture. The truth of any particular claim is less important than the social impact of what is being said, whether words are being used as a tool to signal loyalty, energise a base of supporters, or humiliate an enemy.

In an oral world, language is a tool for direct social action rather than for unveiling a process intended to determine truth.

Terror and Triviality

The qualities of an orally shaped mind are not just stylistic but shape what kinds of ideas are even possible for a person to conceive. Oral cultures can produce powerful stories and practical wisdom, but abstract analysis is difficult since knowledge is designed to optimise for memorisation and impact rather than to convey abstractions.

Epic poems like The Iliad and religious scripture like the Qur’an were written down for preservation, but their structures were designed with oral audiences in mind. They were not structured like novels or textbooks, but rather in a way intended to emphasise repetition, tone, and memory, conducive to preservation in the minds of a population where few could read.

The advent of mass literacy freed knowledge from the constraints of memorisation through the invention of the printed word and page. It also enabled new levels of personal introspection and detachment, since reading is often solitary and insulated from the pressure of face-to-face interaction.

The popularisation of the written word enabled, for the first time, the idea of an objective “text” that exists apart from the speaker and listener and which had its own complete meaning. “Print encourages a sense of closure,” Ong observed. “A sense that what is found in a text has been finalised, has reached a state of completion.” No such idea of a closed text exists in video or even a podcast.

Writing in the early phases of the present technological shift, Ong argued that the decline of reading was not simply a decline of a leisure activity or the replacement of one medium with another. It also meant the decline of the mental habits associated with deep literacy, including internal dialogue and the ability to live with logical complexity. As an educated Jesuit priest, he lamented the loss of all of these as he strove to document the implications.

Postman pushed the argument even further, arguing that the form of a medium doesn’t just change how people reason but also what a culture even considers true. Postman wrote at a time when cable television was rapidly monopolising the attention of the American public and just starting to elbow in on the turf of the written word. Television, he argued, did not just communicate ideas but changed the nature of public communication into mere entertainment. It also made human culture increasingly trivial and, eventually, nihilistic.

When watching a news broadcast, the anchor’s tone, the visuals, the rapid cuts, the need to keep attention, the mixture of grave pronouncements with lighthearted advertising—all combined, Postman argued, to create a world in which seriousness itself became difficult for the viewer, even about deeply serious matters.

“No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. That is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the newscasters to ‘join them tomorrow.’ What for? One would think that several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a month of sleepless nights,” he wrote.

A television-based society working through an oral medium is subtly inclined by the medium itself to treat all information as show business. The staid business of politics transformed into a series of “media events,” often interpreted out of context and forgotten just as quickly. In the technologised world that Postman saw emerging, the ideal citizen was shifted from someone who could follow an argument to someone who could interpret images and maintain emotional feelings.

“We accept the newscasters’ invitation because we know that the ‘news’ is not to be taken seriously, that it is all in fun, so to speak. Everything about a news show tells us this—the good looks and amiability of the cast, their pleasant banter, the exciting music that opens and closes the show, the vivid film footage, the attractive commercials—all these and more suggest that what we have just seen is no cause for weeping. A news show, to put it plainly, is a format for entertainment, not for education, reflection, or catharsis.”

Had he lived to see it, Postman would undoubtedly have recognised that the shift to triviality has become much more extreme with the replacement of cable news by social media video streams, characterised by an even more extreme mix of horror and titillation.

A Culture of Resistance

Oral culture is not inherently anti-democratic or corrosive to culture; primary oral cultures can have sophisticated governance and have given us some of the most profound cultural landmarks of our species. The danger is that orality has been fused with the technologies of mass manipulation and delivered unannounced to a public sphere designed for an entirely different type of reasoning.

If the public sphere becomes characterised by oral-medium communication powered by technology, democratic institutions will become hollow performance sets that can be quickly captured by the best actor in a verbal status contest. Another product of Postman’s era is the current U.S. president, a former reality television star, who used the charms he honed on that medium to win over a public already primed to recognise them.

The internet was initially a force for the strengthening of literate culture. But after the broadband explosion that kicked off around 2006, and corresponding exponential increases in data capacity, it has shifted towards being an oral medium par excellence.

While the mass man of the 20th century was shaped by the newspaper and its structured hierarchies, social media feeds are the primary technological force shaping the worldview of most people today. TikTok and Instagram Reels are merely the completion of television’s logic of oral spectacle triumphing over literate reasoning.

Rather than functioning akin to a library, a social media feed operated as a gossip network, battlefield, casino, brothel, and performance stage all rolled into one. The bias of the medium and its owners is that algorithmically controlled emotional response is a much more important currency than the rational pursuit of truth.

As reading has declined, people have gradually lost the interiority that it was intended to cultivate. This has made them more easily governed by the impulse and emotional contagion inherent to oral-based technology. Stimulated but bereft spiritually, such a person is very far from the slow-reasoning democratic citizen imagined by Enlightenment thinkers. Only a connection to God, maintained through prayer, remains a form of spiritual sustenance for those still able to receive it.

Ong was a religious scholar who knew how the written word shaped the inner life of man, while Postman was a technology theorist who understood how the emergence of a new technology threatened everything built on the old. “Surrounding every technology are institutions whose organisation—not to mention their reason for being—reflects the world-view promoted by the technology,” he wrote. “Therefore, when an old technology is assaulted by a new one, institutions are threatened. When institutions are threatened, a culture finds itself in crisis.”

The world of reading is dying, and the world of the oral-visual image is rapidly being born. Critically, the social decline in reading also seems to have a class basis. The elite continue to send their children to institutions where they will be drilled on the Great Books and expected to develop a familiarity with them, while the masses are left to the mercies of technologically produced mass video and audio content, much of which will likely be automated in the near future.

Avoiding confinement to a future underclass increasingly requires choosing literacy as a practice of resistance. Print culture originally flourished when information was scarce, but the internet’s abundance is changing the meaning of literacy as we speak. It is no longer enough simply to know how to read, or even to read regularly; we also need the meta-skills that determine how to structure our finite attention in a technological environment designed to exhaust it.

In a world where oral media is dominant, a literate subculture will require conscious protection, like a threatened habitat. Reading should be treated not as a form of moral virtue-signalling, but as cognitive training to survive in the psychologically bifurcated world now emerging.

Literacy is also an insistence on maintaining seriousness in an environment where the dominant media of thought are geared towards prioritising spectacle. This development is contributing to an intensifying social nihilism, where the life and death of actual human beings are increasingly experienced as something that flickers across a screen and disappears.

As we are inundated by a technological wave that shows no signs of abating and is already promising new forms of psychological manipulation, the task before us deepens. If we want to preserve the rudiments of modern society—democratic argument, complex thought, interior freedom—we cannot treat reading as a quaint hobby. We must treat it as a foundational technology of human depth that must be cultivated and defended, kept as a vouchsafe of civilisation to the generations ahead of us.

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Author: Murtaza Hussain is a writer and journalist in New York, whose writing on history and politics can be found on Substack.

Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.

Socials: Follow Kasurian on Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.

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