The Obscure Media Theory That Explains '99% of Everything'

Or: How did America's mid-century communications theorists get it all so right?

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The housing theory of everything pins inequality, climate change, obesity, and declining fertility on the West’s inability to build enough homes. If you treat TOEs as literal theories of everything, you will be disappointed to find that they all have holes. I prefer to think of them as exercises in thinking through the ways that single phenomena can have vast and unpredictable second-order effects.

Today’s article and interview are about my new favorite theory of everything. Let’s call it “the orality theory of everything.” This theory emerges from the work of mid-20th-century media theorists, especially Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. They argued that the invention of the alphabet and the rise of literacy were perhaps the most important events in human history. These developments shifted communications from an age of orality—in which all information was spoken and all learning was social—to an age of literacy, when writing could fix words in place, allowing people to write alone, read alone, and build abstract thoughts that would have been impossible to memorize. The age of orality was an age of social storytelling and flexible cultural memory. The age of literacy made possible a set of abstract systems of thought—calculus, physics, advanced biology, quantum mechanics—that are the basis of all modern technology. But that’s not all, Ong and his ilk said. Literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture—the decline of reading and the rise of social media—is again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking, living person.

The most enthusiastic modern proponent that I know of the orality theory of everything is Bloomberg’s Joe Wiesenthal, the co-host of the Odd Lots podcast. On Plain English this week, we discussed orality, literacy, and the implications for politics, storytelling, expertise, social relations, and much more. The following transcript has been edited for clarity, brevity, and the goal of making both speakers sound a bit smarter¹.

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Derek Thompson: The return of orality: Why do you think it explains everything?

Joe Weisenthal: I don’t think it explains everything. I think it only explains 99% 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, mass literacy.

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 Sant Louis University and wrote this really incredible book called Orality and Literacy. The gist is that humans [in oral cultures] really 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, fundamentally the way 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. He writes:

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 running 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.”

Why don’t you expand on either quote, either yours or Joshua’s, because I think this really gets to the fundamental heart of the matter that literacy changed the texture of thinking and the texture of the institutions that we built with new modes of thought?

Wiesenthal: People can probably feel this. When you’re in a conversation, online or offline, what are you doing? You’re often trying to impress someone. You might be trying to one-up someone. Maybe if there’s a few people there, you’re trying to put someone down to look cool for the other person. These are all things that occur that don’t occur when you’re in solitude. A solo interaction with language can only be done really with the written word. And so, even setting aside the logical arguments for the connection between the alphabet and left-to-right thinking and linear thinking, most people I think could intuitively understand that interactive environments foster different priorities.

When you’re writing a letter, or certainly let’s say you’re writing a book as you have, you don’t necessarily have the reader in mind at that exact moment. In fact, you have the luxury of writing and not having to think about what the reader is going to be doing at this moment. These are all luxuries that occur in the context of literacy, the written word that are separate from a conversation. And so, the written word creates all kinds of new opportunities to think through these things, take time, not respond right away.

Thompson: Thinking used to be something that had to be done socially. It was impossible to learn the Odyssey on your own. It was transmitted to you from a person. You would rehearse it with someone else. So the mode of information transfer was necessarily social. Books are written alone and books are typically read alone. And so this age of literacy gave rise to this privilege of solitude and interiority that I think is really, really important.

Walter Ong, our mutual hero, has a great quote that I want to throw to you and then get your reaction to, because it goes right to this point. He said:

”Human beings in primary oral cultures 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, but not study in the strict sense.”

I’m very interested in a phenomenon that I call the antisocial century, the idea that for a variety of reasons, we are spending much more time alone. And that is having a bunch of second and third order effects. And it really is interesting to me as I was going deeper into this project, to think that it’s the age of literacy that in many ways allowed us to be alone as we learned and prize a certain kind of interiority.

Wiesenthal: Marshall McLuhan had this observation: The alphabet is the most detribalizing technology that’s ever existed. It speaks to this idea that prior to the written word, all knowledge was per se communal. It had to be in a group. If you have multiple texts in front of you, then you trust the one that feels most logical. But you don’t have that luxury when all knowledge is communal. Being part of the crowd has to be part of learning.

The ear and the eye are very different organs. You can close your eyes, which you can’t do with your ears. You can get perspective from your eye and establish perspective in a way you can’t do with your ears. So it’s like you go into a room and you can stand back at the corner so you can make sure that you can see everything going on in the room. The ear is very different. We’re at the center of everything constantly. You can’t close it. The ear continues to work while we’re sleeping. There’s an evolutionary purpose for the fact that we can still hear when we’re sleeping, because if there’s an intruder or a wild animal or something, it wakes us up and we can run.

So the ear, McLuhan said, is inherently a source of terror. It feels very digital. Even though we do look at the internet, there is this sense in which we can never remove ourselves from it. Even if we’re reading the internet, it almost feels more like we’re hearing it. There’s an immersiveness in contemporary digital discourse that I think is much more like hearing than it is about seeing. So I think there’s all kinds of different ways that we are sort of returning to this realm.

Thompson: We had the age of orality, which was the age of the ear. Then we had the high watermark of literacy, which is the high watermark of the age of the eye. And now we’re in this messy third stage where it’s like there’s some human facial organ that’s an eye and an ear mashed together because we have TV and radio and social media and TikTok. And what’s interesting about these technologies is that they are all oral. What is radio, if not oral? What is television if not oral? What is TikTok if not spoken and live?

But there’s a lasting record of your tweets. There’s a lasting record of that TikTok which can be shared. And the fact that these pieces of media can be recorded means that in many ways they are also of a piece with the age of literacy, of literate recorded artifacts. What do we make of this weird synthetic new stage that we’re in? What do we call it? How do we describe it?

Weisenthal: Andre Mir, who has written some of the best stuff updating Ong’s ideas, calls it digital orality. I like that. One thing that’s interesting though, and I think this is where AI really comes in, which is that we might not really have those records in the future. I mean, for one thing, things disappear. Two, we don’t really trust pictures anymore. The archive is sort of tenuous. We maybe had this brief period where we had a lot of digital archives and we could trust them, but digital archives are disappearing and you’re going to have facsimiles, things that looked like they happened that didn’t actually happen, which incidentally Ong talks about.

So he talks about how in a lot of oral cultures history was malleable. He talks about biblical genealogies: so-and-so begat so-and-so, begat so-and-so, begat so-and-so begat … on forever. There are a lot of examples throughout in oral cultures where when something is no longer convenient, maybe there are some lineage of kings and that king falls into disrepute and they switch it, they’ll just come up with a new poem. And so there isn’t the idea of a fixed history. I think that’s probably what’s going to happen today. We’re going to have books for a very long time, but history will be manufactured in accordance with the sort of contemporary values of the moment.

Thompson: This is a period that some people call post-literate. Reading is in decline. Standardized test scores are in decline. As I’ve written, it sometimes feels like everything is trying to become television. Here we are two former audio only podcasters talking on something that people will watch on YouTube or Spotify. Social media is becoming TV, podcasts are becoming TV. People are going to the movies less. Everything is evolving toward short form video. I think one way that I think remember putting it is it’s as if short form video is the attractor state of all media. I wonder how you feel about this general thesis space that people are playing in—that in a post-literate age, everything is evolving towards short form video.

Weisenthal: This idea of post-literacy, I think there’s a sort of figurative meaning and a literal meaning. So on the one hand, again, when I hear the word post-literacy or when I’ve used the term, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people don’t know how to read. I still think it’s mostly useful as a term to describe sort of conditions of information and conditions of communication that are very distinct from what we consider the sort the solitary removed literate communications. So I think the fact that so much is talk, so much is back and forthness, so much is information designed to be viral, memorable, repeatable … this is mostly what I am thinking of when I think about post-literacy.

Incidentally, I don’t think people know how to read either. I look at myself and I think I read books way more than 99% of the population. But I’ll read two pages and then I’ll check my Twitter mentions and then I’ll read two pages and check my Twitter mentions. Isn’t that everyone? Can anyone actually read three pages anymore? Maybe it’s just me, and my attention span is just totally bombed out, which is possible because again, I spend all day looking at a screen. I’ll fully cop to that.

Thompson: I do also have the sense when I’m reading that there’s often, especially if my phone is anywhere within reach or sight, that there’s something calling me away from that book at all times.

Weisenthal: One of the reasons that I like reading the mid-20th-century thinkers about media is because I think they have a lot of testable hypotheses. There’s a lot of people writing these days about the effect of the phones and the effect of digital media on ourselves, and it all seems true and I buy most of it. But in finance people talk about how you want “out of sample data.” You want hypotheses that could explain market movements before the markets happen so that you can test whether the hypothesis is valid.

And when I go back and read some of the writing from the ‘60s and ‘70s, one of the things that I’ve noticed a few times in this body of work, people talking about the effect of the phone on interrupting people having sex. This is a common observation. They talk about unplugging the phone before couples having sex or whatever it was. And I think again, one of the things people talk about right now, which I find fascinating, is the big fertility drops and people are trying to figure it out. And this is something that is occurring in almost every country around the world, including China, which does not resemble the rest of the world and has avoided many sort of contemporary pathologies. Even there it’s happening.

And I do think it’s very interesting that if you go back and look at how many people noticed this phenomenon when everyone started getting phones, the degree to which it was as if the phone was the third person there interrupting the privacy of the couple, that’s a very powerful observation that I think then has a lot of explanatory effects for what came afterwards when everyone started holding a phone on them, every waking minute.

Thompson: I want to apply your theories to some domains of modern life, starting with politics. You mentioned Donald Trump, and I went to look up Donald Trump’s nicknames, because I know that you’re very interested in his propensity for epithets, for nicknames. It’s nearly Homeric. And so fortunately for our purposes, Wikipedia keeps track of all of Donald Trump’s nicknames, so I didn’t have to remember them—speaking of outsourced memory. Here’s some of them. Steve Bannon was Sloppy Steve, Joe Biden was Sleepy Joe, Mike Bloomberg was Mini Mike, Jeb Bush, of course, Low Energy Jeb, Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ James Comey, Ron DeSanctimonious, DeSantis. I think that one might’ve gotten away from him.

Weisenthal: That was late Trump, he didn’t have his fastball anymore.

Thompson: This plays into this classic tradition of orality. Right? The wine-dark seas, swift-footed Achilles. And Walter Ong has a great passage where he writes about this, that I would love to get your reaction to:

”The cliches in political denunciations in many low-technology developing cultures, enemy of the people, capitalist warmongers, that strike high literates as mindless are residual formulary essentials of oral thought processes.”

Basically, it’s so interesting to think that Ong is saying that it is low-technology developing countries where these nicknames are prevalent. But you wake up today and thee richest country in the world is presided over by a now two-time president whose facility for nicknames is very famous. I wonder what significance do you put on this? Why is it important that a figure like Trump plays into these old-fashioned oral traditions?

Wiesenthal: It’s interesting when you say things like, “Oh, Trump has a sort of Homeric quality the way he speaks,” that repels a lot of people. Like, “What are you talking about? This is nothing like Homer.” But my theory, which I can’t prove. The original bards who composed Homer were probably Trump-like characters. So rather than seeing Trump as a Homeric character, what’s probably, what I’m almost certain is the case, is that the people who gathered around and told these ancient stories were probably Trump-like characters of their time. Colorful, very big characters, people who were loud, who could really get attention, who would captivate people when they talked. One of Ong’s observations in Orality and Literacy is about heavy and light characters in oral societies. Heavy characters, it’s like the Cerberus, like the three-headed dog, the Medusa, the Zeus. These just larger-than-life, frequently grotesque, visually grotesque characters.

I think if you look at the modern world, the modern world has elevated a lot of what I think Ong would call heavy characters. I certainly think Trump is a heavy character, with his makeup, and his hair, and his whole visual presentation. I think Elon is a heavy character. I think if you look at the visual way that a lot of sort of YouTube stars look with their ridiculous open-mouthed soy faces when on their YouTube screenshot. I think they sort of present themselves, not in a way that we would think of as conventionally good-looking. Right? Not in a way that’s conventionally attractive, but this sort of grotesque visual that just sticks in your head. And that that is clearly what works. We are in the time of the heavy character.

I think you look at icons of the previous age, JFK was not a heavy character. That’s a light character, a certain coolness. Obama was a light character, there was a certain coolness to him. One of the things that people debated a lot, I see, is like, “Oh, if Obama could run again, wouldn’t he just clean up? If Democrats could just bring Obama back for a third time, wouldn’t that just solve all of Democrats’ electoral problems?” And I think in 2016 I probably would’ve believed that. And maybe in 2020 I would’ve believed that. But I’m certainly less confident now. I feel like Obama is a character of a cooler, a different time. A character from a pre-TikTok time, in many respects, maybe more resembling the sort of Kennedy era and so forth.

Thompson: Let me try out a pushback here. I think Obama in 2004 with the first DNC speech, I think he was a heavy character. I think the presidency lightened him. I think Trump in 2015 was a heavy character, and he is a lighter character now having suffered overexposure. Maybe the fissures that you see in the Republican Party are that Trump, the once heavy character, is losing the weight that used to be necessary to keep this coalition together. And people are seeing he’s kind of lost it. I wonder if there’s some idea that in politics people often debut on the political scene as the heavy character. But experience, and time, and failure lightens them. And that’s part of the reason why no president seems to survive more than one year of positive approval ratings. We have learned to hate everybody.

Weisenthal: Since you mentioned this phenomenon that no president can sustain having high approval ratings. Approval ratings, which does seem like not just a phenomenon in the United States, but basically everywhere. I think, could we pivot? Could I bring in Meyrowitz here?

Thompson: Sure. So Joshua Meyrowitz is another writer that you turned me onto. He has a book called No Sense of Place, The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. We’ll talk about that term, No Sense of Place, in a second. But why don’t you just jump right into why Meyrowitz’s theories fit where I was going with politics?

Weisenthal: Meyrowitz in 1985 was talking about electronic media before anyone really conceived of that idea. One of his observations is that everybody has a front stage and a backstage. We talk on this podcast in a certain way. But that is different than how we would talk at home with our family. Or you and I might talk differently when we hang up this podcast and we’re saying goodbye or something. This is a very normal thing, which is that you just talk differently in different environments and so forth.

What Meyrowitz anticipated in No Sense of Place is this idea that electronic media would cause us to come to be suspect of people who talk differently in one environment vs. another. If someone code-switched, if someone talked differently on the campaign trail than they did in their private life, that we would come to think, ”Oh, this person’s a phony.” He predicted that by allowing everyone to see all the facets of these characters, we would view them differently.

Thinking about a politician, something about Trump is that there’s very few examples of him ever talking differently than any other environment. People could be totally repelled by things that he said in public or private. But he’s not a hypocrite in the way that a lot of people use that word. He is the same in almost every environment. This is precisely what Meyrowitz would’ve anticipated, that we would gravitate toward people who when we saw their front stage and their backstage, where the concept of place was completely disintegrated from the idea of character, that we would come to view that consistency of character as a value.

Thompson: The name of Meyrowitz’s book is No Sense of Place. And I want to just slow down on that title, because it’s a pun. It’s not a very intuitive pun, but it’s a really, really smart pun. By No Sense of Place, Meyrowitz is saying that electronic media extends our consciousness outward, so we don’t really know where we are. I could be reading Twitter in Arlington, Virginia, but feel myself becoming emotional about Gaza or Ukraine, or Minneapolis, in a way that was impossible in the age before television or radio. This new age of communications media takes us out of where we are and puts us right in front of the faces of people that are thousands of miles away.

But he also means no sense of place in a hierarchical sense. He means that people will be able, with electronic media, to operate outside of their slot in the hierarchy: the poor will be able to scream at the billionaires; the disenfranchised will be able to scream at those who disenfranchise them. And this he said is going to create more social unrest. It’s going to create more, I think what he would agree now is something like populism. And this really interesting idea that electronic media not only unmoors us from where we are geographically, but that it also demolishes hierarchies, I think it was incredibly insightful, considering it was written 41 years ago.

But he goes one step further in a way that’s really surprising, and this is the part I’d really love you to comment on. He says this about our future relationship to expertise. And God only knows how many people have talked about what’s happened to expertise in the last few decades. Meyrowitz:

”Our increasingly complex technological and social world has made us rely more and more heavily on expert information, but the general exposure of experts as fallible human beings has lessened our faith in them as people. The change in our image of leaders and experts leaves us with,” and this is exactly your point, “a distrust of power, but also with a seemingly powerless dependence on those in whom we have little trust.”

Wow.

Weisenthal: It’s crazy. It does feel like, oh, this could be in the Atlantic in 2025. It’s just so far ahead of its time. You mentioned the poor can scream at the billionaires. I think most people would say, look, technology is an enabled environment in which the poor can have their voice heard, and billionaires are brought low and can be hectored, and we see that happen every day online. Most people intuitively think that’s a very positive development. That’s like an egalitarian development. But by the same token, there are other things that most people will probably... they’re not as comfortable with. And so, I think this whole field of study offers a certain way of viewing history that is not entirely satisfying to anyone or anyone’s particularly, certainly political project currently.

Thompson: Speaking of topics that aren’t particularly comfortable with any political project, I have a question about AI for you and how AI slots into orality versus literacy. I want to come at it from what I hope is an interesting angle. This is a quote from Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong:

A written text is basically unresponsive. If you ask a person to explain his or her statement, you can get an explanation. If you ask a text, you get back nothing, except the same often stupid words, which called for your question in the first place.

I remember rereading that section on a plane recently and I jolted up in my seat. I was like, that’s what AI has changed. You can enter into conversations with text. That is true either at a literal level—like I can download a PDF of a book, and give it to Claude and be like, Claude, can we talk about this book? But also, at a higher abstract level, we’re talking about a technology that is pre-trained on text. It’s pre-trained on literacy. But we have an oral, which is to say conversational, relationship with that training corpus. It’s weird.

Weisenthal: It’s weird.

Thompson: A weird new alien media.

Weisenthal: I totally agree. The jury is out still on how AI slots into this. Because on the one hand, [you can] upload some texts to Claude and ask questions, and it becomes an interactive thing. That’s oral, that’s conversation.

On the other hand, those conversations with AI, they don’t feel like other conversations that exist online. The AI is not going to insult you. The AI is not going to speak to you in memes. The AI is not going to use epithets. I’m not trying to one-up the AI either. Ong used the word agonistic; oral cultures are competitive. We see that online and social discourse, how we’re always competing with each other when we’re talking.

AI chatbot communications aren’t agonistically toned. Just the opposite. Most people’s complaint with AI is that it’s too obsequious, that it’s not confrontational enough. I’ll say something stupid into the chatbot, and it’ll say “that’s a really good idea, Joe! Let’s explore that further…” This is actually one of the big problems of AI, which is that it’s insufficiently opinionated. The chatbots do not correct you. So, AI is conversational, but it doesn’t have a lot of these other aspects of conversation that other digital conversations have.

Thompson: Maybe the age of social media really was the revenge of orality. But an age of AI would be much more like the revenge of literacy.

Ong, Havelock, and Meyrowitz all point to this idea that literacy pulled us into ourselves. Reading is interior. And then novels in response to the interiority of reading became more interior. Nineteenth century novels are incredibly rich about what is it like to be thinking and alive in this moment. It’s not plot, plot, plot. It’s not genealogy. It’s fully inside the phenomenological experience of the characters.

And AI to me feels much more sub-vocal. It feels like I’m having a conversation with myself. It’s not myself. It’s this machine that I’m talking with, but it feels more like daydreaming with myself than the antagonistic experience of being on Twitter, where I’m inside the minds of other people, thrust into the faces of strangers who I’ve never met.

Weisenthal: It’s very plausible. It’s not going to look exactly like the previous age of literacy, but it never does. So, these things come and go. The current age of orality is different, obviously than the original one. The return to solitude. If you’re going back and forth with the chatbot, you close the computer, you don’t feel that same, oh, they’re still arguing there without me. They’re talking online about me and I’m not there to defend myself. Whatever it is. You don’t quite have that same pull. So, I think all these things, they’ll live with each other and there’ll be shades of the past that we hear echoes of, and they’ll be different and they’ll be similar. And I think it’s good to recognize these patterns and observe them, just for one’s own sanity—to have a sense of what’s pulling you in various different directions.

Thompson: To close with the Joeism, what’d I miss? What’s important in this space that we didn’t have time to talk about or that I didn’t sufficiently ask?

Weisenthal: I just think, by and large, that there are a lot of contemporary pathologies. People point to digital media, the phones, et cetera, as drivers of them. What I would just say is there’s a lot of writing that I think helps answer these questions that was written before any of this existed. I would like it if more people became familiar with Josh Meyrowitz, and Walter Ong, and Eric Havelock and Marshall McLuhan and so forth, people became more familiar with them. I think I would like that. I just want to talk to people about them.

1. These Plain English transcripts have been really successful so far: People seem to be reading them, liking them, and listening to the show. If you like what these transcripts bring to the newsletter, let me know in the comments. If you don’t, let me know, too. I want to find the right balance here. If you just read this newsletter for the original essays, that’s fine, too: the next original essay will publish later this week.