The habit of inquiring, brought by literacy, corrupted oral indoctrination. This all began to reverse with electronic media. Amusement, induced by electronic media, undermined the conditions favourable for inquiry. When people are absorbed into emotional resonance with the tube, less and less room remains for rational inquiry. A chapter from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

Before writing, there were two main forms of education: apprenticeship and storytelling. Apprenticeship submerged trainees into practical trade situations, while storytelling submerged listeners into mimetically recreated situations with moral and instructional exemplars from the heroic past. Walter Ong writes:

All thought, including that in primary oral cultures, is to some degree analytic: it breaks its materials into various components. But abstractly sequential, classificatory, explanatory examination of phenomena or of stated truths is impossible without writing and reading. Human beings in primary oral cultures, those untouched by writing in any form, learn a great deal and possess and practice great wisdom, but they do not “study”.
They learn by apprenticeship – hunting with experienced hunters, for example – by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship, by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them, by assimilating other formulary materials, by participation in kind of corporate retrospection – not by study in the strict sense.[1]

As Havelock puts it, “The learning process was not learning in our sense but a continual act of memorisation, repetition and recall.”[2] The tribal encyclopedia could be learned, but it was not about learning. Its re-recording served to incorporate people into tribal identity.

Apprenticeship and epic storytelling, both aimed at the practical training and indoctrination of youth, were immersive. They sucked pupils into practical or mimetic situations.

This started changing when the necessity emerged to learn a new trade – the craft of writing. The scribal schools must have started like any other trade education – with the diligent repeating of the simplest actions after the master scribe. But the skill of writing included also the skill of reading, which cannot be mechanically repeated. Reading requires understanding the meanings of symbols, which can come only as an intellectual exercise with significant effort on the side of the learner.

The growing complexity of symbols led to the emergence of the separate rules of semantics and grammar, which described why certain symbols represent certain meanings and why certain symbols join others in a certain fashion. The rules could not be grasped by mechanical repetition after the craftsman. They needed to be explained and understood. For the first time in history, the affordance and therefore necessity to sit and learn emerged.

The question “What does it mean?” is essential to reading. Literacy legitimized questioning, an intellectual activity that could not be employed during mechanical repetition after a tradesman or in verbomotor resonance with a storyteller. Questioning the meaning of signs supplied a pattern for questioning the meaning of everything. If orality fostered mutual indoctrination, literacy inaugurated personal inquiry.

Goody and Watt write that Herodotus, the first literate author and the founder of historiography, invented the method of historia – “personal inquiry or research into the most probable versions of events as they were to be found in various sources.”[3] In ancient Greek, the word ἱστορία meant “learning through research, telling of what is learned,” from ἱστορέω – “to learn through research, to inquire.”

Before writing, no teacher would ever have been interested in what a disciple thinks. All of a sudden, Socrates started asking pupils what they really mean when they say something. Interestingly, while reflecting on this transformation, Havelock employs the same metaphor of awakening that Jaspers uses to characterize the Axial Age:

If the educational system which transmitted the Hellenic mores had indeed relied on the perpetual stimulation of the young in a kind of hypnotic trance, to use Plato’s language, how did the Greeks ever wake up?
The fundamental answer must lie in the changing technology of communication. Refreshment of memory through written signs enabled a reader to dispense with most of that emotional identification by which alone the acoustic record was sure of recall. This could release psychic energy, for a review and rearrangement of what had now been written down, and of what could be seen as an object and not just heard and felt. You could as it were take a second look at it. And this separation of yourself from the remembered word may in tum lie behind the growing use in the fifth century of a device often accepted as peculiar to Socrates but which may well have been a general device for challenging the habit of poetic identification and getting people to break with it. This was the method of dialectic, not necessarily that developed form of logical chain-reasoning found in Plato’s dialogues, but the original device in its simplest form, which consisted in asking a speaker to repeat himself and explain what he had meant.[4]

Havelock highlights how offensive the act of re-asking must have been for oral tradition, as it would dismantle the formulaic structures and their power of hypnotic resonance. With it, old authorities were undermined. Ong writes:

 By storing knowledge outside the mind, writing and, even more, print downgrade the figures of the wise old man and the wise old woman, repeaters of the past, in favor of younger discoverers of something new.[5]

The habit of inquiring, acquired by the learned individuals of the literate era, corrupted oral indoctrination. Stories were replaced with theories, and storytelling was replaced with theorizing. Grounded in questions rather than answers, theorizing deritualized the mind.

This all began to reverse with electronic media. Amusement, induced by electronic media, undermined the conditions favourable for inquiry. Radio and especially television made emotional rapport the commodity that deeply permeated all spheres of public life, including politics, as revealed by Neil Postman in his 1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. When people are absorbed into emotional resonance with the tube, less and less room remains for rational inquiry. People just join and resonate in the fashion of the verbomotor communion of the audience with the bard, cheering or booing certain parts of the story, thus verifying the story’s relevance. In TV-watching, even when questions do arise, they often fail to persist and transform into inquiries; instead, they come and go with the TV schedules.

To combat the influence of television and, in a broader sense, postmodernism, Postman in his 1999 book Building a Bridge to the 18th Century suggested restoring the educational principles of the 18^th century, the Age of Reason and Enlightenment. The idea of countering postmodernism with the educational principles of modernity is both logical and unfeasible. Books, lengthy texts, are far superior to TV in fostering intellectual self-immersion and inquiry. However, books require a level of environmental detachment that is not possible on a statistically significant scale when electronic amusement is available. Electronic immersion became so panoramically rich that it sucked in people’s time and attention, leaving less time and attention for deep reading.

Even more so do digital media now. To activate inner vision, gadgets must be prohibited, and books reinstated. It might be doable within a family policy but impossible at the statistical scale – at the level of the entire society. Media evolution can reverse media effects and retrieve media functions, but it never reintroduces media devices. Books may still exist as physical objects or e-texts, but lengthy reading has ceded its share in media diet to immersive digital multitasking – to the temptation of a single click redirecting attention to things that are more captivating than exhaustive and time-consuming lengthy reading.[6]

Not only has the idea of reinstating print literacy in education been broadly ignored, but the most progressive educational theories themselves have advocated for the so-called “immersive education,” which is an inherent practice of primary orality and the direct opposition of alphabetic and print literacy. Immersive education is a marshal at the parade of orality retrieval; immersive education is the enemy and gravedigger of literate education.

Paradoxically, Marshall McLuhan played a part in this by coauthoring the 1977 book City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. The main idea of the book suggested to follow the changes in the cultural environment and “to get students in small teams to go outside, to study the setup of the situations that they live with every day and to discover what they’re made of,” as McLuhan explained it in an interview.[7]

Though McLuhan was logically consistent: electric and now digital media reversed the detaching effect of literacy and submerged humans back into situational living. Education just followed media evolution. It should be understood, however, that immersive education provides entertainment and, at best, exploration, but not studying. In the practices of immersive education, what students really learn is being immersed into the media that entertain them. Learning through entertaining teaches being entertained. Learning by alleviating the efforts of learning teaches effortlessness. True studying does not entertain the sensorium, only the intellect.

The listeners of Homer were well trained in verbomotor and emotional resonation with the stories of political quarrels between gods, kings, and heroes; they could recite sayings, but they did not learn the concepts of politics, history, or morality. Moreover, they lacked an opportunity to inquire about such subjects. In the collective-environmental immersion, one needed to resonate, not to question. Those who questioned were swiftly ostracized, the best example being the death sentence for Socrates.

The lack of conditions for personal enquiry in the collective-environmental immersion summons the other side of the same coin: indoctrination. Of course, indoctrination has always been a part of education. Literate education, however, assumed the solitude of reading, the source of contemplating, theorizing, and enquiry. To indoctrination, solitary reading was an eternal source of constant challenges (this is how the Protestant Revolution commenced, for instance). Immersive education, on the contrary, disfavours the solitude of reading and thus creates a new, additional affordance for indoctrination simply due to its environmental, technical settings. Pupils are expected to join some activities so that their own verbomotor activity has educational value. When pupils are encouraged to contribute their identity, not inquiry, to the tribal resonance of immersion, “identarian” indoctrination becomes inevitable. The self-criticism innate to literacy fails to check this failure, as critical theories themselves have reached their limits in filling the theoretical space and reversed into normative theories impervious to critical thinking.

Mutual indoctrination is amplified evermore by the environmental effects of social media, which are designed to extract users’ requests for affirmation in pursuing the resonance of virality, the most desired (both by people and social-media platforms) outcome of collective-environmental immersion. Digital orality recreates an environment in which collective indoctrination is encouraged while personal inquiries are suppressed.

Andrey Mir

A chapter from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

See also books by Andrey Mir: 

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)
• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

[1] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 8.

[2] Havelock, Eric. (1963). Preface to Plato, p. 157.

[3] Goody, Jack, and Watt, Ian. (1963). “The Consequences of Literacy,” p. 324.

[4] Havelock, Eric. (1963). Preface to Plato, p. 208.

[5] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 41.

[6] Mir, Andrey. (2002, winter). “The medium is the menace. Ubiquitous digital media offer potent rewards – but at the price of eroding our sensory and social capacities.” City Journal.

[7] McLuhan interview on The City as Classroom. (1977). McLuhan’s New Sciences blog.

Categories: Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror, Media ecology

Tags: books, Digital Environment, digital-literacy, education, literacy, Media Ecology, Orality and literacy, reading