We're Returning to the Age of Talking

You read three pages of a book, then check Twitter. Read two more pages, then pick up your phone again. If this sounds familiar, you might be standing at the center of the biggest shift in human consciousness since the invention of writing.

Media theorists call it "the return of orality"—the idea that characteristics of oral culture, which dominated humanity for thousands of years before writing, are resurging in our digital age. And this shift is fundamentally changing how we think, communicate, and do politics.

What Homer and Trump Have in Common

Donald Trump's nickname game is almost artistic. "Sleepy Joe Biden," "Low-Energy Jeb," "Mini Mike Bloomberg." Why do these labels pack such punch?

Mid-20th century media theorists Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan offered a startling insight: In oral cultures without writing, people communicated in special ways to make information memorable. Rhythm and rhyme, repeated phrases, striking epithets. Think of Homer's "wine-dark sea" and "swift-footed Achilles."

Bloomberg's podcast host Joe Weisenthal puts it this way: "When you say Trump has Homeric qualities, people recoil. But my theory is that the original bards who composed Homer were probably Trump-like characters—colorful, loud, captivating when they talked."

Oral cultures prized "heavy characters"—visually striking figures like three-headed Cerberus, Medusa, Zeus. Today's Trump and Elon Musk fit this mold. Meanwhile, the era of "light characters" like John F. Kennedy or Barack Obama—cool, measured figures—may be passing.

The Alphabet Revolution and Its Unraveling

The invention of writing was among the most important events in human history. In oral cultures, all learning was social. You couldn't study The Odyssey alone—someone had to tell it to you, you practiced it together, repeated it with others.

But writing changed everything. For the first time, you could write alone and read alone. This wasn't just a technical shift. As University of New Hampshire'sJoshua Meyrowitz explains:

Writing enabled solitary contemplation. Calculus, physics, quantum mechanics—all the complex abstract systems underlying modern technology emerged from this ability to think alone.

But what about us now? We read two pages, then check our phones. This isn't just distraction—our consciousness itself is shifting back.

Digital Orality: The World of Viral and Memes

Social media looks text-based, but examine its characteristics closely and it's remarkably similar to oral culture. What do we do on Twitter or TikTok?

• React instantly (oral culture's immediacy)
• Try to go viral (oral culture's memorability)
• Use memes and repetitive structures (oral culture's formulaic patterns)
• Perform for an audience (oral culture's social nature)

Walter Ong called oral cultures "agonistic"—competitive. Online, we're constantly trying to one-up each other, craft wittier replies, win likes and shares. It's exactly what Ong described.

Compare this to reading alone. You don't compete with the author. You don't perform for other readers. It's just you and the text in quiet dialogue.

Is AI Oral or Literate?

Artificial intelligence complicates this picture. Walter Ong wrote: "A written text is basically unresponsive. If you ask a person to explain their statement, you can get an explanation; if you ask a text, you get back nothing except the same, often stupid, words."

But AI changes this. You can upload a PDF to Claude and say, "Let's discuss this book." Text becomes conversational.

Yet AI conversations differ from social media. AI doesn't insult you, respond with memes, or compete. Instead, it says, "That's a great idea! Let's explore that further." It's conversational but not agonistic.

AI feels more like thinking out loud—oral in form but introspective in nature. It might represent an entirely new mode of communication.

The Post-Literate Moment

We're entering what some call a "post-literate" age. Reading scores decline. Attention spans shrink. Everything evolves toward short-form video. TikTok dominates. Even news becomes visual.

Weisenthal notes that post-literacy doesn't necessarily mean people can't read—it describes "conditions of information and communication that are very distinct from solitary, literate communications."

He confesses: "I read way more books than 99 percent of the population. But I'll read two pages and check my Twitter mentions, then read two pages and check again. Can anyone actually read three pages anymore?"

This fragmentation of attention isn't personal failure—it's civilizational shift.

Politics in the Oral Age

Trump's political style makes perfect sense through this lens. His rallies resemble ancient gatherings around storytellers. His nicknames stick because they're designed for oral transmission—memorable, rhythmic, emotionally charged.

Meyrowitz predicted this in 1985. Electronic media, he argued, would make us suspicious of people who "code-switch"—who talk differently in different settings. We'd gravitate toward those who remain consistent across contexts.

Trump rarely changes his tone whether speaking publicly or privately. This consistency, which many find off-putting, may actually be what oral-age audiences demand.

Meanwhile, traditional political communication—policy papers, detailed platforms, nuanced positions—feels increasingly obsolete. Politics becomes performance, story, spectacle.

The Expertise Crisis

Meyrowitz also foresaw our current relationship with expertise. Electronic media would expose experts as "fallible human beings," creating "distrust of power" combined with "powerless dependence on those in whom we have little trust."

Sound familiar? We need experts more than ever—for climate science, pandemic response, economic policy—yet trust them less. We can directly challenge Nobel laureates on Twitter, making expertise feel less authoritative.

This isn't necessarily progress or decline—it's transformation.