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Don't You Think It's Time To Start Thinking?
(wordsmith.social)
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this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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Then we reinvented oral traditions through illiteracy and social multimedia. I read an Atlantic article that talked about how we've been living in an oral age for some time now, and it has stuck in my mind ever since.
Even though it's technically written communication, texting, slack, teams chats, and platforms like Twitter have much more in common with oral societies than ones based upon written text
and this leaves out oral platforms such as YouTube, podcasts, and TikTok. Having a debate about something on Twitter is more akin to getting into a verbal spat or an oral debate than it is to long-form letters sent back and forth between two disagreeing parties, or people publishing pieces making arguments in newspapers.
I think it also aligns with the American environment of increasing illiteracy. Some teams messages I receive daily are obviously orally dictated speech to text. My company may be an exception but there is a large emphasis on long meetings where people are forced to regurgitate written communications and parts of documents live.
I apologize a bit because this takes this thread in a completely different direction, but once you realize we live in an oral age it's basically impossible to unsee.
Okay, so I can take onboard the idea that the written word has become an amalgam of speech-to-text bullshit and internet newspeak has eroded the quality and lucidity of our discourse, but the only thing I'd take away from you is that when I speak of an oral tradition, I'm referring to a cultural body of knowledge that is transmitted orally which often involves long group sessions of oratory importantly based on rote memorization. What we do orally in our culture does not compare to the depth and richness and (this is key) the mental faculties that accompany such a cultural tradition.
I agree that it hasn't been going on long enough to be considered a tradition yet, but I think over time it may develop into one
almost out of necessity
because there is no alternative with a functionally illiterate populace. (Besides the seemingly obvious one of educating people back into literacy.)
In the same article, they speculated that LLMs may be the revenge of the written word and may lead to a change. But having to work with LLMs
practically by force
I see it differently.
LLMs allow people routes around reading and writing. They aid illiteracy. They summarize and elaborate almost like a lossy compression or decompression algorithm for the written word. They allow you to take a single sentence and pretend that there was more thought behind it than there truly was, and they digest written language and produce things that allow you to be more comfortably illiterate. Functionally, they're a hack to allow orally oriented people to pretend that they're more literate than they are.
Yeah I like the take that LLMs are a fascist artifact. They reduce language, our most valuable way of connecting with others, solving problems, sharing knowledge, etc. into a thing you pay not to think about and for output that is frequently wrong and cannot know when it's wrong.