Joe Weisenthal: I don’t think it explains everything. I think it only explains 99 percent of everything.
I believe that human communication is becoming more oral. And by that I don’t just mean that people are talking more with their mouths, although I do think that is the case. It’s more that communication in general, whether in the spoken form or in the digital form, has the characteristics of conversation. And it truly harkens back to a time before, really, the written word, or certainly before mass literacy.
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In 2016, during the presidential election, I started reading the work of Walter Ong. He was a Jesuit priest. He studied with Marshall McLuhan. He was at Saint Louis University and wrote this really incredible book called Orality and Literacy. The gist is that humans [in oral cultures] fundamentally think differently when they’re in this world that you can’t write anything down, that you can’t look anything up. For most of human history, there was no way to look up anything at all. There was no reference material and so forth. And as such, people had to optimize their communication for the conditions of that time.
Through a lot of study of Homer and other ancient epics, people realized that there were certain patterns of communication. People spoke with rhythm and rhyme and musicality, because it helps people memorize things. Certain phrases just get repeated over and over again. Repetition, communication, and information were optimized for memorability, in packets, and what we would call “going viral.” When I started reading this book, I was like, Look, this has a lot of explanatory power. These things that characterize the Homeric times—the way society prioritized and packaged information—greatly resemble what we see today. My big thesis is that as communication becomes more of this back-and-forthness, it’s changing the way that we communicate and the way we think.
Thompson: To drill down on why the shift to literacy was so important for the way we think, for the way we transmit knowledge, for the way we build institutions, I want to quote two great scholars here. The first is Joshua Meyrowitz, an emeritus professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire. He writes in No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior:
The break from total reliance on oral communication allows people to become more introspective, rational, and individualistic. Abstract thought develops. From the circular world of sound with its round huts and round villages, people move, over time, toward linear, cause and effect thinking, grid-like cities, and a one thing at a time and one thing after another world that mimics the linear lines of writing and type.
The second is from another great scholar named Joe Weisenthal:
Many of the things that modern institutions are built on—enlightenment thinking, formal logic, reason, meritocracy, examining the evidence—are downstream from the ability to contemplate the written word at a distance.
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