Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Did you hear Wednesday's episode of Today explained from Vox? We called it Everything is Clips Now because when you open up your social media and start scrolling, you've probably noticed that everything is clips. Clips of podcasts, clips of TV shows, clips of movies, clips of sports. Our guest called it the TLDRification of the entire Internet.
Chapter 2: What are the effects of clips on our content consumption?
Because it kind of truncates everything. everything we make. And it all goes down to, we need a way for people to discover our content. And right now, the way to get people to discover the content is to make clips of it, no matter what it is.
One of the things we're not doing when we're watching all those clips is reading. We made a show about that too. But we also, also, also made a show about what not reading is doing to our brains, our politics, and our potential to connect with each other now and in the future. And we're going to bring you that show once again today. Enjoy.
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Today Explained. Today, Explained from Vox here with Eric Levitz from Vox to talk about what we're doing instead of reading.
Yeah, well, so at the same time that reading is going down, the amount of time that Americans are spending on screens is going steadily up to record highs. This raises questions about how this really massive change is affecting the way that we think and the way that our culture and politics operate.
And your piece focuses on something called orality. Help us understand what that is.
So some analysts who have tried to answer this question of what is all this doing to us have looked back to how the advent of literacy and the rise of book reading changed human consciousness and culture and what human consciousness and culture were like before literacy and before reading.
A lot of this analysis is really rooted in this 1982 book, Orality and Literacy, by the philosopher Walter Ong. In that book, Ong argues that there are a few defining traits of communication in oral societies. One is that in an oral world, information needs to be verbally repeated in order to survive. So you need to speak in a way that is going to be enjoyable and easy to repeat.
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Chapter 3: How does orality influence our communication today?
Antichrist or Armageddon. Curtis Yarvin. The absolute normal form of government is monarchy. JD Vance. Have you said thank you once? Whatever else you think about them, they read a lot of books, they talk about books. You know, I think that a lot of the most prominent authoritarian leftists or Stalinists generally weren't especially unacquainted with libraries. Often they were intellectuals.
And so reading, you know, is no vaccine against having authoritarian, illiberal ideas. It's reasonable to worry that the mental habits instilled by TikTok and ChatGPT won't be as conducive to liberal democracy as the written word.
That said, I think that this is really speculative, and I think that there's a lot of reasons to doubt that this change in human consciousness or culture, this return to an oral mode, is what's driving political dysfunction in the United States, as some of them suggest.
Okay, but one thing on which there is no ambiguity is that we are trending in one direction, which is reading less and watching more. And where is this heading? I mean, with what, the advent of AI and the fast creep of AI into every aspect of our lives, are we only to expect more orality, less literacy?
You know, the one bit of caution that I put in the piece about this is just that there's always anxiety about new technologies and how they're going to change the way that humans think and communicate. So more than 2000 years ago, Socrates was really worked up about the novel media technology of his day, writing.
And he kind of decried it in much the same terms that people decry AI today, you know, addressing himself to the inventor of writing, the hypothetical inventor of writing.
He said, you have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding. You provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much, while, for the most part, they will know nothing.
So, you know, you thought that being able to write things down, people won't have to memorize poems anymore, they're going to get dumber. I think there's more reason to be worried about AI than there was about writing in ancient Greece, but, you know, something worth keeping in mind.
Eric Levitz wrote about orality for Vox.com. When we return on Today Explained, we're going to talk about what got us here, those pesky little videos.
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