The way we communicate online bears a striking resemblance to pre-literate oral cultures—not because we've forgotten how to read and write, but because social media has fundamentally altered how we create, consume, and remember information. This shift represents what I call "digital orality": a paradoxical return to oral cultural patterns in an age of unprecedented textual abundance.
The Collapse of Linear Time
Perhaps the most profound aspect of this transformation is how social media has collapsed our experience of linear time. We live in what media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls "present shock," where everything happens in an eternal now. This manifests in several ways that eerily mirror pre-literate societies.
Consider how we mark time online. Rather than referring to calendar dates, we organize our collective memory around events and phenomena—"during the early pandemic," "back when Everyone Was Making Sourdough," or "that summer of Sea Shanty TikTok." This event-based temporality closely resembles how oral cultures tracked time through significant occurrences rather than abstract numerical systems.
What's particularly fascinating is how this affects our relationship with archived information. We simultaneously save everything and remember almost nothing. When was the last time you actually revisited your bookmarked articles or Twitter likes? The modern digital archive functions less as a library and more as a collective unconscious—theoretically accessible but practically forgotten unless actively recirculated.
The Necessity of Perpetual Presence
This new oral culture demands constant participation. You can't simply withdraw from social media for months of focused study and expect to seamlessly re-enter the conversation. The context, language, and reference points will have evolved beyond recognition. As media scholar danah boyd notes, social media creates "context collapse," where understanding requires continuous immersion in the flow of discourse.
This mirrors how oral cultures transmitted knowledge through active participation in community life rather than solitary study. The lone scholar poring over texts in isolation is becoming an anachronism. Today's intellectual must be, at minimum, a lurker in the digital agora.
The Evolution of Language and Truth
The velocity of linguistic evolution online is staggering. Terms, phrases, and reference points that felt cutting-edge mere months ago can suddenly read as embarrassingly dated. This rapid evolution of language parallels the dynamism of oral cultures, where language was constantly in flux, unanchored by the standardizing force of written texts.
More provocatively, our approach to determining truth has shifted away from institutional authority toward what we might call "vibes-based epistemology." This isn't as unserious as it sounds. Oral cultures developed sophisticated systems for evaluating truth claims through consensus, reputation, and pattern recognition—similar to how online communities today assess credibility through a complex web of social signals, shared context, and pattern matching.
The New Oral Traditions: Memes and Copypasta
Perhaps the clearest evidence of our return to orality is the rise of memes and copypasta. These digital artifacts function remarkably like traditional oral folklore:
They spread through repetition and variation
Their meaning is highly context-dependent
They serve as vehicles for cultural knowledge and social commentary
Their transmission relies on community participation
Their origins often become obscured or irrelevant
Media scholar Limor Shifman's work on memes suggests they serve many of the same social functions as traditional folklore: building community, establishing shared reference points, and transmitting cultural values.
Knowledge Networks and Digital Tribes
One of the most significant parallels between digital and oral cultures is how knowledge transmission depends on social networks. You can't simply "look up" how to join certain conversations or communities—you need to be inducted into them through participation and relationship-building.
This represents a sharp departure from the enlightenment ideal of the autonomous scholar accessing universal knowledge through text. Instead, we're returning to a model where knowledge is socially situated and access depends on community membership. This has profound implications for how we think about education, expertise, and authority.
The Paradox of Digital Archival
The relationship between memory and archives in digital culture presents a fascinating paradox. We have unprecedented ability to save and access information, yet our actual engagement with this archive more closely resembles oral cultural patterns:
Information must be actively recirculated to remain in collective memory
The context of saved information becomes increasingly opaque over time
The sheer volume of archived material makes effective retrieval challenging
We rely more on social memory than individual archival practices
This suggests that mere availability of information isn't sufficient for cultural memory—information needs to be actively maintained through social circulation, much like oral traditions.
Implications and Tensions
This shift toward digital orality creates several important tensions:
Institutional Crisis: Traditional knowledge institutions struggle to adapt to an environment where authority comes from engagement rather than position.
Educational Challenges: How do we design education systems that acknowledge the importance of network participation while maintaining rigorous standards?
Historical Record: What happens to our ability to understand the past when our primary mode of cultural memory depends on active circulation?
Digital Divides: How do we address the fact that meaningful participation in this new oral culture requires constant connectivity and cultural capital?
Looking Forward
The emergence of digital orality doesn't mean we're becoming "less literate" in any simple sense. Rather, we're developing new forms of literacy that combine elements of both oral and written cultures in novel ways. Understanding this shift is crucial for anyone interested in how knowledge, culture, and community function in the digital age.
This transformation challenges us to rethink fundamental assumptions about:
How we preserve and transmit knowledge
What constitutes meaningful participation in culture
How we establish and maintain authority
The relationship between archives and memory
The nature of literacy itself
Conclusion
The parallels between social media culture and traditional oral societies offer valuable insights into our changing relationship with information and knowledge. Rather than seeing current trends as a deterioration of literacy or intellectual culture, we might better understand them as a return to older patterns of human communication and knowledge transmission—patterns that served human societies well for millennia before the advent of writing.
Understanding this shift as a form of "digital orality" helps explain many seemingly paradoxical aspects of contemporary digital culture: why we save everything but remember so little, why constant presence matters more than deep study, and why memes might be more significant cultural artifacts than we typically acknowledge.
As we continue to navigate this transformation, the challenge will be to develop new institutional and educational frameworks that acknowledge and work with these emerging patterns rather than fighting against them. The future of knowledge transmission may look more like our distant past than we might have expected.
This piece draws on work by Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, danah boyd, and other scholars of media and communication theory while attempting to extend their insights into our current moment of digital transformation.
