Primary orality had some capacities for fragmenting—oral communication was naturally constrained by time and space. The digital flow is not. An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.
Our life is immersed in the flow of natural cycles and structured by them. Writing arrested the flow and captured it in tiny fragments of records – words (read about the effect of fragmentation).
Parchment codices and especially printed books brought about the tertiary effects of fragmentation reality by writing – the selectiveness and the completeness of the story. For a book to be published, the author and the editor must select the ideas and complete the text. Similarly, newspapers had limited paper space and demanded the selection of news. Printing industrialized the fragmentation of reality. Any text should be completed by the time of printing and encompass the amount of fragmented reality suitable for physical delivery and selling for a certain price.
The ripple media effects piled up. Space limitation and selectiveness led to the emergence of editorial policy, which eventually formed the patterns of political and cultural agenda: “breaking news – politics – economics – entertainment.” Radio and TV shows, the products of “secondary orality” (orality based on literacy – Ong), had their own limits of scheduled airing and followed the rules of fragmenting the flow of reality into the selected and complete stories.
The very materiality of the medium drove the selection and refining of content as the corollary of fragmentation. The necessity to complete the text trained the Gutenberg mind to perceive reality in logically structured and complete fragments – news, novels, documents, conferences, meetings, projects, programs, etc. Fragmentation, the selection of fragments, and the completeness of selected fragments were rarely noticed but crucial mind-shaping effects of literacy. Percept shaped concept: the world was seen, and human activity was organized, through well-structured and complete patterns.
This is now being reversed by digital orality. Digital media returns us to the natural state of the flow. Text and pictures published on websites – the residue of Gutenberg culture – may have represented Gutenberg’s completeness, but they are consumed as a digital stream in the process of web surfing. The digital orality of social media is a stream, literally – one just cannot find the end of the newsfeed to stop scrolling. The newsfeed flows. It has no beginning and no end.
Since social media engagement is stimulated by hormonal rewards that are instigated by the promise of recognition, as in real communication, the issue of digital addiction emerges. The user cannot break free from digital immersion in the same way as the oral individual cannot exit the natural environment. These are just two different types of environments – the natural and the digital – but the totality of immersion is almost identical. The only reason for a user to interrupt the immersion in the digital stream is the user’s willpower or physical exhaustion. Or Wi-Fi shutdown.
However, there are distinctions in fragmenting the flow of speech between primary orality and digital orality. Real oral communication was naturally constrained by time and space; the digital flow is not. Having become digital, tribal conversation escaped the time limitations of oral talks; but it also escaped the spatial limitation of the physically present audience, as digital speech reaches out instantaneously to any corner of the globe to any number of users. Digital orality transcends the “streaming” affordances of primary orality. Digital orality is even “more oral” than primary orality due to technical facilitation of the communication exchange by the time- and space-ignorant medium of the social media platform.
Curiously, the merging of oral and written speech into digital speech alters the structural capacities of traditional written language. The ways people “speak” on social media have already affected punctuation, for example.
Punctuation served alphabetic fragmentation and was a substitute for essential, yet unavailable in written form, verbomotor means of expression (for instance, such are exclamation and question marks). Modernist prose and poetry have already experimented with punctuation. In postmodernity, the rejection of punctuation became a tool of disruption in the revolt against power structures. Some authors, for example, reject capital letters or quotation marks for ideological reasons.[1]
Capital letters and full stops are indeed tools of mandatory thought structuring, and they have become increasingly omitted not only for artistic or ideological reasons but also in regular written – or rather digitally typed – communication. This trend is especially noticeable among younger individuals who subliminally perceive capital letters or full stops as signs of passive aggression.
However, punctuation’s demise, whether it is due to an ideological manifesto, subliminal psychological avoidance, or simply a result of naturally growing illiteracy, also reflects a general environmental tendency of the reversal of written speech, inherently structured, back into an unstructured flow.
The affordance for writing to become an unstructured flow of communication emerged on social media. But now it proliferates into other forms of writing. The trend is further propelled by the fact that the digital orality of social media and all other forms of writing use the same technology of text production – keyboard typing. The customs of digital orality are becoming the norms of digital literacy. On top of this, keyboards are now virtual, and they actively suggest using emojis and pictograms instead of words, thus often replacing text with digital verbomotorics.
With the reversal of fragmentation, selection, and completeness, digital orality dismantles logical structures brought about by literacy. Without fragmentation and structuring of the flow, content returns to the natural forms of storytelling, social grooming, and quarrel – the forms of tribal exchange. Literate structuring and fragmentation fostered completeness and distancing; without them, the mind submerges into the digital flow of occurrences and becomes shaped by it. In the newsfeed environment, the reaction delay needed for deliberation is not encouraged. As a result, less and less we see what things are per se but focus instead on their situational display – on the shadows in Plato’s cave.
An excerpt 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] See, for example: CBN NEWS. (2021, September 9). “‘Capitalization is oppression’: Canadian Univ VP says ‘Reject the symbols of hierarchy’, especially capital letters,” or: Kappler, Maija. (2023, October 3). “Why are so many authors abandoning speech marks?” The Walrus.
Categories: Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror, Digital orality, Media ecology, Media literacy
Human as Media 
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