Social Media and Oral Culture
Source:
Social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture: - We're not illiterate in the sense that we can't read, our writing approximates our speaking - Our writing isn't as complex because it doesn't function like text used to - We both archive everything and trust our collective memory -- everything is saved, bookmarked, etc. but never revisited (when was the last time you bookmarked a website or even checked your own likes?) - For information to be remembered it has to be recirculated, repeated, or go viral or we forget because time moves so fast (similar to storytelling?) - You can't look things up easily because we live in a perpetual now -- if you don't understand the context of the discourse, you need to ask someone to catch you up - This also makes society very participatory -
This has weird knock-on effects like needing to *always* be online to know what's going on in the world - you can't just hermit away and study, at a minimum you're lurking - Because of the way the Internet treats time, when we do revisit the past, it's marked by events vs. actual moments in time - do you remember 2017 or what was meme-worthy then? - There's always a current thing - Language evolves quickly; things feel dated quickly - We determine if things are truthfulness through vibes/tribal consensus - there are authorities but they're cults of personality vs. institutions - You can't "just learn" things, you need to be in the right networks -
Memes, copypastas, etc. are very similar to oral cultures - I actually don't know if any of this is right so feel free to correct me
Woof, so we’re considered post-literate? What?