オーラリティの万物理論

The Orality Theory of Everything - The AtlanticThe 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 theories of everything 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 large and unpredictable second-order effects.

My new favorite theory of everything is 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 among 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, in which writing could fix words in place, allowing people to write alone, read alone, and develop ever more complicated ideas 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 form 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 person.

The most enthusiastic modern proponent of the orality theory of everything that I know of is Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal, the co-host of the Odd Lots podcast. 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 smarter.

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 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.

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,