Every technology that extends human capability also changes what it means to be human. This technology I’m referring to is literacy or in broader aspects, literary tradition. As a society we’ve believed that literary tradition was permanent but today we are realizing that it is a transition before we return to a new yet familiar tradition, digital orality.
For most of our history humans practiced oral tradition. It wasn’t until much later that oral tradition had its largest evolution, complex language. Complex language from this oral tradition is extremely different from what we consider complex language in literature today. Oral tradition consisted of a different communication framework consisting of things like modular chunks where each sentence was almost self-contained, simple structures chained by “and” instead of complex subordinate clauses, redundancy in using phrases like “brave soldier” instead of “soldier” in order to prevent lossy transmission, and consistent immutable phrases.
This entire framework was built on the fact that all of oral tradition was built on top of the collective memory of human society. Everything had to fit in distributed human memory so it was extremely important for language to be repetitive and easy to memorize. You could quantify all of humanity’s memory at the time by taking the number of humans in a culture and multiplying it by the quantity a human can memorize. Humanity was faced with the problem of trying to store more information while being constrained by its own mental limits. Thus the perfect data compression algorithm is born, poetry.
Poetry was the perfect method to preserve knowledge whilst also compressing it. Rhythm, rhyme and repetition were the perfect techniques for memorizing information. This discovery led to oral language becoming beautiful, not because it was expressive but because it was necessary for its survival. Information had to be worthy of being sung or else it would disappear and be forgotten forever. Practical and beautiful language were two sides of the same coin.
Once humanity completed its transition from oral to literary tradition it was finally given an external memory storage. For the first time in human history knowledge could be preserved and stored externally breaking its former human memory constraint. This meant that the former structure prioritizing memory would be changed and now the priority would become processing, since you can revisit information the structure now serves thinking instead of remembering. This shift in structure leads to the emergence of systematic logical sciences and consequently the decline in the need for beautiful artistic forms of communication. The evolutionary pressure to create beautifully expressed messages has been alleviated and “ugly” information can finally be preserved. Walter Ong, writer of Orality and literacy : The technologizing of the word, expresses this beautifully: “There is hardly an oral culture or a predominantly oral culture left in the world today that is not somehow aware of the vast complex of powers forever inaccessible without literacy. This awareness is agony for persons rooted in primary orality, who want literacy passionately but who also know very well that moving into the exciting world of literacy means leaving behind much that is exciting and deeply loved in the earlier oral world. We have to die to continue living.”
Humanity seems to have reached its final form , a technologically advanced society where information can be stored and later analyzed, but signs show us that humanity wants to return to its oral-like communication patterns whilst also retaining its memory preserving technology. In other words after experiencing both traditions humanity wishes to combine the pros of both and to our surprise we’re beginning to see this take place. This can be seen in the rise of social media, videos, podcasts, memes, TikTok’s, AI Interaction, and online communities.
The central catalyst that is accelerating the destruction of literary culture is AI. This is because it helps bridge both traditions without neglecting the other . When using AI we are communicating with it, not just reading from it. AI preserves Oral pros by being conversational, accessible and situational. While also preserving literary traditions by breaking human memory constraints, having reviewable conversations, and logical processing abilities.
People tend to believe that AI is guilty of harming human expression but it might just be that writing was the original culprit. Humanity has left its oral home and ventured out to seek a new tradition only to return home to a new hybrid form of past tradition which we now know as digital orality.