Rose Horowitz

speaker

180 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 23 Jul

Rose Horowitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Radio Atlantic · Is the Age of Reading Over? · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

Right.

So I think the one thing that Ong really understood was that writing text is just a very different process than speaking it.

We tend to use more complex sentence structures than vocabulary.

You know, when you write something down, it kind of gives you distance because you can see it reflected back at you.

So you can go back to it and get new understanding.

You can kind of take on a more complex analytical task.

You know, it's a more dispassionate spread of information because you don't immediately see the person who wrote it at the same time.

And so he was arguing that it's just, it's very different and that this ushers in a sort of entirely new mode of thinking, a kind of rational, linear, analytical way of thinking, and that that is sort of a precondition for a lot of the modern types of study that we think about today, you know, philosophy and modern science and kind of history as an academic discipline, that those things required reading and writing.

Yeah.

So I think there's two elements to it.

I mean, one is that we just speak a lot faster than we write.

And so, you know, it forces you to slow down and think a little bit more about what you're putting out there.

And then at the same time, it's like when it is frozen before you, you can see it reflected back at you, this message.

And so you can

you know, sort of return to it for new understanding, think about how to reorder it, edit it, all these things that we can't really do with speech because it just disappears into the ether.

And so it sort of allows for this kind of logical way of thinking.

And that, yeah, that quote from Postman really stuck out to me too.

It's mediated through this kind of, you know, writing because we're talking about writing.

Okay.

Yeah, so as part of my reporting for this piece, I interviewed a lot of cognitive scientists and was kind of trying to understand, like, okay, what does happen to our consciousness?

Showing 41–60 of 180 · page 3 of 9