In talking to an old friend about learning styles, a range of related thoughts occurred to me about experience and media, with specific thoughts on mediated reality and the world it creates. Both my friend and I are neurodivergent. That might affect the context a bit. But most of what I have to say should apply more broadly to neurotypicals as well, specifically in relation to orality and literacy. And as often is the case, my thoughts here will meander a bit, as I’m trying to make sense of new info.

To begin, my friend is a visuospatial thinker. That is a fast and efficient way of processing a lot of info, and quite impressive at times. It requires greater capacity for cognitive load and cognitive complexity, at least of a particular kind. She models the world and orients herself within those models. They’re three-dimensional with moving parts. She can think about how all the pieces interact and so imaginatively manipulate them to predict the results, then to use those predictions to change the results in the real world.

But there are some weaknesses as well. She is extraverted and externally focused. Also, my sense is that she is far more extrinsically motivated than I am. She admits to not having a strong inner voice (nor well-developed cognitive empathy, the ability to understand someone else’s inner self, including their inner voice). As she explained it, she has to take her mental experience and then translate it into language. It’s an interpretive process. But that can be a stumbling block in trying to communicate her inner experience.

That visuospatiality might be closer to an oral style. Some have observed that many oral people express amazing ability to visualize and imagine spatial relations, such as an intuitive sense for mechanical devices and how to fix them. Another thing is that oral cultures are actually often far less verbally-obsessed, instead allowing more space for silence, as well as more space for other senses, sometimes synesthetically. Orality is about a fuller embodied and enworlded experience.

My own thinking, if possibly overlapping with that of my friend’s, is different. I may have high verbal intelligence now, but that wasn’t the case when I was younger. Because of a learning disability related to word recall, my learning to read was delayed. And even then, I didn’t begin to engage with harder texts until high school. In line with that early verbal deficiency, the one area where my childhood self excelled was in fluid intelligence, especially puzzle-solving.

There is definitely a visuospatial component to it. It’s possible that, prior to becoming fully literate, I had a more visuospatial mentality that was dominant or at least developed significantly. But I’m not sure, as it’s hard to access one’s pre-literate self. Even now, I can spatially visualize to a fair degree. And I do have a natural talent for aesthetic appreciation (e.g., I notice when pictures are crooked on a wall), along with related abilities like pattern recognition.

A couple of things come to mind, though. My visual capacity may have diminished as my literacy advanced, as if the two mentalities are in conflict. Whereas I was drawn to creating visual art when younger, that creative impulse has largely dried up. My interest in music has also declined, and I find I can’t as easily read while music is playing — they compete for my attention. Even when I want to listen to a voice, I’m more inclined toward spoken word than sung word.

While having aged, I’ve become increasingly entrenched in a literary mentality, to the point of near graphomania. I’m constantly engaging with text. I’m always in the middle of reading numerous physical books, along with my online reading and writing. Then at night, I fall asleep to some audiobook, which plays as I’m sleeping — as the words drift into my consciousness, I hear parts of it as I wake up in the middle of the night, sometimes with it still playing as I wake up.

I live in written language! And my mind rarely shuts down and not easily. Nor does my inner voice go quiet without my intentionally shifting it through mindfulness or distracting it by way of external input, such as a tv show or movie. Intensive, focused physical activity, such as hacky-sacking, also works. Otherwise, as a default mode, my mind goes prattling on all day long. It’s my superpower, as constantly working over info is how I build deeper insights and extensive thought structures.

Yet my way of thinking isn’t entirely verbal or maybe not even primarily verbal. If I don’t have the visuospatial virtuosity like my friend, I have another means to a similar end. I’m a very feeling-oriented person, not just in the emotional sense. I lead with feeling, such that I often feel my way into ideas and the connections between them. I sense what resonates, which corresponds to what interrelates, what is synonymous, etc. It’s a feeling tone that I’ll also use when having trouble with word or info retrieval. It’s a slow method, if thorough in how it can bring so much together, potentially far beyond the visuospatial.

* * *

It’s hard for me to figure all of this out, as I suspect my mind really has changed greatly over the decades. My psyche — and my life — feels fractured these days. There is often a gap, sometimes a gulf, between mind and body, self and others, individuality and world, knower and known, actor and acted upon, etc. Also, a separation of the sensorium, such as of the visual and verbal. It exacerbates alienation, not that non-literary new media is better in this regard.

In reading Barry Sanders’ A is for Ox, I’m reminded of how that splitting is an artifact and defining feature of the literate mind. Maybe my friend has better maintained her own powerful levels of visuospatial skills because she reads and writes so little these days, albeit she did so more in the past. She spends far more time doing physical and social activities, including visual art. She is always doing something tangible in the world. (As a side note, she also wastes less time on the internet than most.)

Though such literacy-based splitting and splintering as I exhibit may seem like a horrible fate, it has its advantages. Modern civilization wouldn’t be possible without it. It’s what allows high levels of abstraction. Everything is broken down into its components and categories. That in turn allows them to be restructured in various ways, including toward radically imagining new prospects or else using juxtaposition to force divergent thought.

Orality tends to be stuck in conventional patterns, as the concrete sensibility is overriding. Whereas literacy, in particular alphabetic language with formal usage of punctuation, allows for complex arrangement of words and what they represent. Hence, recursive language (i.e., embedded phrases) makes possible recursive thought (i.e., layered & interwoven). There is a dynamic quality to this. (My friend says that she has lost much verbal complexity over time, partly because of a brain concussion. But she can compensate with her visuospatial complexity.)

Consider some of my convoluted long-form essays. It’s not only that the arguments I make and the views I present wouldn’t be possible to convey in mere orality. More importantly, with orality alone, it wouldn’t be possible to think those thoughts in the first place. I can only attain such intricate complexity of original thought by building upon the structure of writing, as there is no way to hold all of it in the mind at once. Text is an extension and affordance — it holds info for you while your mind is preoccupied with something else.

Of course, there is a price to be paid for that gift. For example, a divide also forms in temporal experience, forming into a linear sense of past and future, thus making it difficult to be in the present moment. A literary mind can record what happened, dismantle the parts, and conceive of a different future or, as a thought experiment, even a different past — one can become dislocated in time, forever several steps in one direction or another. Opposite of that, the oral mind is present-oriented. Even in cyclical time, each revolution is a return to the same place.

Also opposite of literacy, in being present-oriented, orality is immersive, embodied, situated, and holistic; what’s known as 4E cognition (or 5E with ecological or enworlded; various other Es have been suggested) — a common feature being the de-emphasis or elimination of the individualistic framework. The literary individual, in contrast, stands separate from or above, sometimes experienced as outside and at other times inside. This creates the modern dilemma of the individual at odds with community and collectivism.

Another literacy-caused cost, according to Barry Sanders, is a darkening seriousness. This is one point, though I’ve intuited it, I never previously grasped its exact significance. Sanders talks about the role of the trickster figure and archetype in oral cultures: playfulness, humor, mimicry, deception, and lying. But literary culture increasingly loses that quality, resulting in literal-minded fundamentalism and scientism where verbal constructs are mistaken for reality.*

I must admit that I’ve observed this in myself. As I’ve become more text-oriented, I’ve lost the creative playfulness I once possessed or once possessed me. My friend, on the other hand, has maintained that aspect to a far greater extent. She is less obsessed with a literary ideal of truth-seeking, something that so passionately drives me. She is far more content in the immediacy of life, and so probably less divided. Rather than truth, she most values pleasure and enjoyment; and she is a bit of a social butterfly.

* * *

For further contrast, I could speak of yet another old friend. He used to be as much of a book reader and writer as I still am. But for some reason he almost entirely stopped all literary activities for the past decade or so. Instead, he became addicted to video games, combined with depressive antisociality. It did cause a difficulty in our friendship, as not only had our preferred activities diverged but maybe our mentalities as well. We were in a different headspace.

We no longer had as many of those deep intellectual conversations that are motivated by studying and contemplating heavy literature. But in addition, his video game habit would be an example of tertiary orality. While it’s a loss of literacy, it’s not a return to full orality either. He too had lost the kind of oral creativity and playfulness we had when younger, such as when we’d take turns telling stories. Also, in isolating himself, he lost the habits of sociability, including how to talk to strangers.

This past year, he began microdosing psilocybin mushrooms and some LSD too. It seems to have broken down the psychic dam. In having become interested in a woman, he began to playfully text her and the creative impulse was reawakened in him. Texting also is part of tertiary orality, as a product of digital media (secondary orality arose from electronic media: radio, tv, etc). But since my friend has a literary background, he gave his texting a more literary bent.

But there is something about psychedelics, in particular. When my friend and I had our greatest creative output in playfully telling and writing stories together, we both had been doing psychedelics — the trickster, one might note, is sometimes a storyteller or else a story disruptor; one way or another, an active agent in the narratizing process. One could note that psychedelic usage is common in many oral cultures. There is an interesting relationship between psychedelics and language.

Psychedelics, without a doubt, very much tap into the trickster archetype (i.e., Lewis Hyde’s Hermes the Light; discussed in “Why are you thinking about this?”). They dissolve the boundaries, if only temporarily, that are artificially constructed; and so one gains access to a fluid immediacy. Those divisions proliferate in a literary culture and mentality. And if not occasionally softened to be made pliable, either through psychedelics or another practice (meditation, mindfulness, mind-wandering, getting into the zone, etc), they can become soul-deadening.

That said, our presently emerging post-literate period is a sledgehammer that destroys all that is good and worthy in literacy. It’s not like psychedelics that might just loosen up the mind and allow in fresh air to aid creativity. In the post-truth age of post-literacy, we find ourselves overrun by trickster-like trollishness, meme magic, and owning the libs. Donald Trump is the ultimate post-literary trickster figure as con man, specifically a television celebrity of secondary orality.

That is the polar opposite of the trickster psychonauts —  Philip K. Dick (PKD), Robert Anton Wilson (RAW), and Terence Mckenna — that Erik Davis speaks of in one of his most recent books, High Weirdness (Low Trash, High Weird), a book my male friend has been reading. Though all having sought experience beyond ordinary language, they were still writers who remained creatures of literary culture. They weren’t seeking to destroy literary-based civilization, as part of a deranged post-literate vision of End Times or accelerationism.

What has really got me thinking is Barry Sanders’ A is for Ox. It’s one of those books that, though much of it familiar, has introduced to me new ideas, perspectives, and interpretations. It’s been challenging me to rethink certain things or else expand my understanding. Having been published in 1994 (the year I graduated high school), it apparently was forgotten about, unlike the writings of Marshall McLuhan, Walter J. Ong, and Neil Postman that grew in influence over time.

It’s impact on me is similar to Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Published in 1985, I was nine years at the time; and only got around to reading it last year. Postman was discussing the media world I grew up in, and so it was fascinating to read of examples from my childhood media consumption, from the perspective of an academic. Likewise, Sanders was also writing of my generation and with far more biting critique, if sometimes overwrought moral panic — sort of amusing, in reminding me of the strange fear-mongering of that era.

Several decades of hindsight gives one some vantage. While his scholarship is impressive, I’ve felt an impulse to constantly argue with the author in that his occasionally extreme conclusions probably only applied to a small subset of Generation X. He was asserting that most of my peer cohorts had already become post-literates, but that doesn’t fit my early life experience, not even in the public schools of the Deep South. Literary culture was still dominant back then.

* * *

Then again, the more I read of Sander’s book — about half way through — the more I’m convinced he was onto something. While the full effect of his prediction might only be appearing now, he could’ve been more right about my generation than a superficial take would give it. After all, one of the largest and strongest demographics of MAGA support for Trump is, sadly, that of GenXers. For 45-64 year olds in 2024, data from the Roper Center shows 54% having voted for Trump (How Groups Voted in 2024).

“The Associated Press reported that voters between the ages of 45-64, roughly those of us in Gen X, voted for Trump over Harris 52% to 46%, a six-point margin. That’s even wider than the three-point margin by which Trump carried his fellow boomers (51%-48%) and a one-point increase in Gen X support for Trump from 2020″ (Christopher J. Scalia, Trump’s Dramatic and Ironic Gains with Gen X). Many of us have become cynical in embracing a post-truth world and its attendant reactionary politics. Trump’s illiterate and anti-intellectual style apparently appealed to a large number of GenXers.

“Trump’s delight in irony has its dangers. You don’t have to be a Harris supporter to see how his habit of challenging rhetorical conventions is parallel to his disregard for political standards. It also has the drawback of encouraging cynicism: If every convention is mockable, if every norm is bogus, if nobody can ever reliably be held to sincerely mean what they say, the overall political ethos is likely to echo Nirvana’s Gen X anthem, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”: “Well, whatever, never mind.””

Maybe too many in my age bracket really were long ago affected by a weakening and erosion of literary culture. It isn’t only about the decline of book reading. Sanders makes an unusual argument. Though we GenXers did receive an early education that prioritized literacy with high rates of kindergarten attendance, what was being lost was the foundation in the orally-experienced ‘Mother Language’ that transforms literacy into a literary mentality. And his explanation is persuasive.

To not get into the weeds, let’s put it simply. The premise is that full literacy builds upon orality. If not mentioned by Sanders, this touches upon Walter J. Ong’s theory of secondary orality. GenX was the first generation to be raised on electronic media, not merely exposed to it as also happened to the prior generations. It’s because GenXers, with divorced parents or both parents working, were latchkey kids that were left alone with a panoply of old and new media: telephone, radio, boom boxes, Walkmans, CD players, television, cable, VHS players, video game systems, Game Boy, desktop computers, etc.

As a literary mentality isn’t only about reading text, an oral mentality isn’t only about hearing words. Oral mentality only fully develops in face-to-face dialogue with others, not in passive listening to recorded voices that disallow living engagement and interaction. This is the danger of parents having used the boob-tube as a babysitter, however worse it is now with giving infants a personal tech device. There is also a vast difference between singing with others in a band or choir and singing alone to a song played on the radio or streaming service.

We live in a time of the disintegrating oral-literary matrix. That’s where Sanders brings in a unique perspective that helps us to better understand the relevance of secondary and tertiary orality. Rather than being in total opposition, orality and literacy have been co-developing for the past few millennia. It formed into a relatively stable culture and social order, having ruled during the Gutenberg Parenthesis now coming to a close. Whatever is replacing it could take generations or centuries to similarly stabilize, assuming it ever does.

In any case, I’m gaining new insights from A is for Ox. Thinking back on my own early experience, maybe I did get a better oral grounding than many GenXers. My mother, a speech pathologist, was always a conversationalist and I spent a lot of time with her, as the youngest child and a momma’s boy. But I also was taught how to orally make an argument and debate by my father, a professor. So, my life experience could be taken as evidence of the orality-literacy link.

Interestingly, this can be made into practical advice and policy. If this view is correct, the best way to increase literacy, as an ability but specifically as a mentality and culture, is not to teach literacy as early as possible. Instead, it’s to immerse children in full-throated orality. That might mean keeping kids away from all media technology during this pivotal and formative phase of development. Instead, young children should spend as much time as possible around others, of all age groups. They need to be socialized first in the dialogical world of a living community.

* * *

Where Sanders line of thought gets especially intriguing is his Jaynesian-like theory about the literary-induced formation of individuated self-consciousness. It makes one wonder. What if many GenXers, along with many in the following generations, really haven’t fully individuated, as compared to those in the older demographics born and bred in the oral-literacy dynamic. Maybe it was more than a spike of lead toxicity and a shift of neoliberalism that so harmed my peer cohort.

My brothers have told me that it’s specifically middle-aged rural Iowans who are the most reactionary, the most MAGA. Older rural Iowans, instead, are some combination of old school Democrats, former union members, land conservationists, and moderate conservatives. It’s possible that a stronger oral-based literacy could’ve been instrumental in moderating their politics by having tempered their mentality.

If so, this makes for a case that we maybe need both more orality and more literacy. It’s a failure not only of a changing media environment, with parents not controlling and supervising, and with tech companies targeting children. To my mind, it’s certainly hard to entirely blame parents who are more stressed than ever, have longer commute times, sometimes are forced to bring work home with them, and in general have more demands on their time and energy.** Besides, how are they to compete with the pervasive influences of the larger society (Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption).

There also might be a vicious cycle going on. If the present crop of parents, mostly GenXers and Millennials, didn’t get that early oral foundation, few of them would have the example and experience, nor knowledge, to be motivated to do anything different with their own children, even for the privileged few who do have the energy and time to do so. It might be natural for these parents to give their kids a smartphone or tablet, since children’s entertainment media have been normalized for their entire lives.

My two above-mentioned friends are more similar to me, in having had educated parents, each with at least one parent who was verbally-inclined. The female friend’s mother was an English teacher and, like my mother, a talker. As for the male friend, his grandfather was an English professor and his father almost got an English PhD, with their having been much verbal play and banter in the family, along with use of an extensive vocabulary. So, if these two friends later drifted away from reading and writing, they nonetheless got the initial grounding in it and, maybe more importantly, a grounding in orality.

Even that visually-focused friend would’ve received both a strong oral foundation and a strong literary exposure. So, if she never developed as strong of an inner voice that is the basis of the individuated self and literary-mindedness, she has spent her entire life around highly literate people in this and other liberal college towns and creative hubs (Iowa City, IA; Portland, OR; & Corvallis, OR). Also, at one point, she did read and write more. So, she internalized that, however much her visuospatial abilities remained central.

Also, both of these friends grew up here in Iowa City, one of the leading literary towns in the country. As it’s a highly educated population, there would be the pattern of how such people tend to talk to children more than do the under-educated. Those embodying literacy say more words, use a larger vocabulary, and speak in more complex sentences. It’s an oral experience that is shaped by literacy, as the literacy is founded on orality.

Yet even in a place like this, there is the takeover of secondary and tertiary orality, if less dramatic. Literary culture will linger here for much longer. What could be the nail in the coffin, though, is that primary and secondary education has de-emphasized reading entire books and hand writing essays, partly because literary capacity and attention span has atrophied with students. If literary culture disappears even from college towns, that could be disruptive or even devastating for society.

The female friend mentioned here briefly subbed in the local public schools. Rather than being taught by a teacher, students are given a tablet with which to do all their work. The teacher’s main role, from how it sounded, was merely to help the kids and keep them on track. The teacher monitors the students working on their learning programs. This is necessary because the new generations of kids struggle to follow directions and stay focused. Another substitute teacher I know says that she has to repeat directions constantly. So, besides being unable to read long-form text, they’re challenged even to follow the spoken word.***

Many teachers have complained that administrators expect them to be entertainers. From addictive Tik Tok viewing and such, kids these days supposedly have an attention span shorter than that of a goldfish. Compare that to the heyday of a public literary culture, as part of the oral-literacy matrix. Neil Postman describes the Lincoln-Douglas debates (1858). The audience stood for several hours listening to highly literate argumentation. In other debates of that era, it wasn’t uncommon to take a lunch break and then continue for another several hours.

Without that immense capacity for civic engagement, it’s questionable if democracy is possible. There is a reason that, upon being freed, the former slave communities went to such effort to gain literacy. But it seems that literacy is only as strong and functional to the degree it retains its roots in orality. Maybe even early scholarship, built on the literacy of formal Latin as a dead language, was able to operate in inculcating modern intellectuality and science because it was enmeshed in the larger culture where orality still reigned. The academic, when they left the university after a day’s work, returned home or stopped at the pub where the Mother Tongue was spoken.

* * * * *

*Note 1:

That said, the other side of fundamentalism is biblical criticism, and the other side of scientism is scientific objectivity. It’s the serious-minded pursuit of truth, largely an unconcern for oral cultures, that makes the literary mind unique. The high level abstraction of literacy creates the concept of an unchanging truth that can be captured (e.g., natural las), as related to the idea of an unchanging self (i.e., WEIRD bias; see Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World).

Such a static and stable worldview is a prerequisite for modern scientific research and technological development, along with such things as democratic governments built on unchanging ideals. To the literary mind, this is a serious endeavor — the joking, mercurial trickster isn’t welcome. The reason for this seriousness might be that, unlike orality, literacy isn’t a natural state that has existed for most of human evolution. It requires a lot of work to create and sustain a literary mentality, both in the individual and in society.

A similar point was made by Julian Jaynes about individualistic (ego-)consciousness, as the contained self or propertied self (Brian J. McVeigh). He connected two points. First, ancient people were able to accomplish amazing physical feats without almost any technology or infrastructure, of which would seem impossible today (e.g., Great Pyramids, not even using slaves). Second, schizophrenics exhibit near tireless energy. Maybe maintaining rigid egoic boundaries is severely taxing on the body-minds energy reserves. The fluid, non-egoic self has a lot more energy to work with.

This could be a contributing factor, besides physical health issues (diet, toxins, etc), for increasing prevalence of mental illness. But it could even have something to do with the mitochondrial dysfunction that underlies so many other diseases and disorders (Chris Palmer, Brain Energy). As part of the metabolic system, it could be that mitochondria are being over burdened by modern stressors, and one of those stressors may be the entire post-oral media, starting with literacy. That is even more true with how the height of literary culture required the introduction of sugar and stimulants to make extended mental focus far easier.

**Note 2:

By the way, I despise the ignorant who claim people work less today than in the past. The world was a different place prior to the neoliberal breakdown of extended families and communities (e.g., parishes). Employed individuals may do less paid work than average compared to the past. Yet in many ways, they’re doing more unpaid work than ever before. That would include unpaid work from one’s job as well, such as when the boss emails you something to be done outside of the workplace.

Part of this is because, until quite recently, most of the parenting was often done by alloparents, typically family living in the same house or nearby — it takes a village to raise a child. Also, all the housework, yardwork, gardening, shopping, etc used to be divided among numerous adults or done together. Then there is the fact that older siblings, in the past, usually stayed home to help as well; and didn’t move out until marriage and sometimes not even then. But today, parents have to do it all by themselves, especially with professional childcare being so expensive.

Also, even if earlier last century an individual worker with a formal job might’ve clocked in 50-60 hours per week, nonetheless it was usually only one parent working a job outside of the home. Divided by two parents, that was actually only 25-30 hours per week outside the home. That one job often was able to support the entire family, sometimes with far larger families at that; sometimes with subsistence farming to ensure food: a garden, egg-laying hens, and possibly a milk cow.

Few women were employed, for various reasons. But now both parents are most often working jobs out of necessity, along with having to do all the work that was once done by a housewife, older children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, etc — pooled labor potentially allows for less labor per individual (e.g., a multigenerational household versus the same people living in multiple residences). In constantly moving for education, training, and employment, the isolated nuclear family now has immense pressure placed upon them. And most of the work they’re doing, of course, isn’t be documented in the job stats.

Put this in context of evolutionary norms. Going by the data, the average hunter-gatherer may only work about a third to a half of what is done by an employed modern Westerner (original affluent society; see Marshall Sahlins). And much of that tribal work was communal, social, and relaxed. They were rarely in a rush, as talking and singing was as important as the work itself. Other than food procurement and preparation (15-20 hours per week), a large part of it was busy work, not necessarily anything that had to be done at a specific time.

Compare that to the modern Western worker: 40 hours work a week (for each individual, often longer for salaried positions), combined with maybe another 20+ hours in preparation for work, commute time, driving around, appointments, shopping, cooking, housework, yardwork, childcare, finances, answering work-related email, health-related activities, stress-reduction, etc. For many people, on workdays, they’re preoccupied doing one thing or another from waking to sleeping. Then on weekends, they’re running around doing everything they didn’t have time for during the week.

Some of that work, in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, happened naturally with no effort. One got exercise merely by existing. And generally speaking, in having little stress, hunter-gatherers didn’t need to spend the time to reduce and ameliorate stress nor collapse at the end of the day from stress-induced exhaustion. In the modern world, almost everything becomes either work or somehow compensation for the demands, harms, and problems of work. Nearly everything revolves around the concept of work. Whereas hunter-gatherers prioritize leisure and social activities.

Some evidence indicates that might’ve been true of many premodern populations, particularly prior to the industrial revolution. “Certainly historians of medieval work life routinely assume the work week was much less than 312 days because of 50 or 60 days of religious holidays” (Gregory Clark & Ysbrand van der Werf, Work In Progress? The Industrious Revolution). In Dancing in the Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich made the same point. There was some major social event on a fairly regular basis. Much of the labor that medieval peasants did was simply in preparation for the next round of partying.

Like hunter-gatherers, socializing is what mattered most. A large reason of this was simply the nature of the work. Agriculture requires intense work during planting and harvesting. But for most of the rest of the year, such as from late fall to early spring, there is far less to do: repairs, toolmaking, etc. The socializing was, in many ways, essential to survival. It strengthened bonds of community. That is what helped people to make it through hard times, not the mere labor of an individual.

In addition, both hunter-gatherers and medieval peasants relied heavily on the bounty of natural resources. Yes, this took some work, but not nearly as much as agriculture. Gathering firewood and plant foods, checking traps and fishing lines, etc isn’t generally arduous work, as it’s typically done at an easygoing pace. The premodern world wasn’t a rat race. At the same time, nature exposure and sunlight were health-promoting. Ironically, modern Westerners have to work so much partly for costly healthcare to deal with the stress-related diseases caused by work and unnatural conditions.

This is where Sanders argument breaks down a bit. Though the new media does have powerful effects, it’s in many ways being blamed when it’s often a side effect. Or rather our relationship to that media is being shaped by other factors. When people worked from home as multigenerational farm families, there would’ve been no need to use television as a babysitter, even if television existed. Sometimes, it’s conditions unrelated to media that determine how media is used and the effect it has on people.

The breakdown of the orality-literacy matrix is part and parcel of a longer term breakdown of the entire social order that began with the early modern enclosure movement and land reforms that created landless peasants who became capitalist workers (Enclosure of the Mind). That was followed by industrialization and urbanization. None of that was being driven by media changes, if media changes exacerbated them. Orality had been weakening for centuries, but it was so gradual as to be imperceptible.

If we are to blame media, it would be literacy that was of primary fault. It’s what created the individual that replaced and weakened all of the social ties upon which orality depended. It was one thing when literary culture was limited to the elite: aristocrats, writers, clergy, etc. But it inevitably was going to spread, something that already began in the late Middle Ages. The tumult from the 14th to the 17th centuries was very much a product of a literary onslaught upon orality. Then literacy slowly destroying orality eroded the very foundation of literacy.

An oral culture requires people with tremendous amounts of free time where nearly all work is social and where socializing is prioritized over work. But it’s not about people necessarily having conversations all of the time. Much of orality involves simply being around people with most communication expressed non-verbally through embodied presence and interaction. It’s ironic that, with loss of oral culture, we feel ever more compelled to drown ourselves in constant noise.

***Note 3:

The loss of full orality also comes up in Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together (2011). Trained as a sociologist and psychologist, she is one of the leading media scholars in the world. In her research, she has done many interviews. Writing 15 years ago, her main observation is how controlled, curated digital interactions had already, for many, replaced real life intimacy with all of its messiness. The younger generations have preferred the ability to determine the pace, edit their comments, construct a persona, and maintain distance.

Actual conversations with a living, breathing person feels too risky and overwhelming. Once the most defining feature of humanity, the ability to casually and pleasantly talk with another human being has become a prospect of anxiety and threat. Many young adults fear they might say something wrong or simply not know what to say at all. They explain that they don’t know how to either start or end a conversation. So, they just avoid them altogether (Paul Barnwell, My Students Don’t Know How to Have a Conversation).

This points to how, in contrast, a traditional literary-based education actually required learning how to speak in public. Oftimes in the past, rhetoric itself was taught, along with debate and oratory. Or if nothing else, students had to regularly read or recite text in front of the class, as was common in my schooling. In addition, almost all teaching was done orally. The teacher spoke to the class and, when called upon, students answered questions out loud. Until quite recently, it was rare for students to have media tech, other than a calculator, in a classroom.

Related to dialogical ability, Turkle also had noted what, at the time, was an empathy decline. From the late 1970s to the late 2000s, there was a 40-48% decline in US college students. This was presumably related to the fear-mongering about rising narcissism (Jean M. Twenge & W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic, 2009). This fits in with the dire mood carried over the the 1990s, of which infected Barry Sanders’ mind. Evidence points to that children develop cognitive empathy toward others before they can internalize it in developing their own inner sense of self. Research does show that novel reading, specifically, does increase development of empathy. Literacy is key.

But having grown up in politicized mass media that was seeping in right-wing culture war, I’m always circumspect about moral panic about ‘kids these days’, as the same game was played on my generation and earlier generations as well. That isn’t to say I’m dismissive, though. I take all charges seriously. My concern is mostly how inter-generational conflict creates distortions. In the end, I want to see an evidence-based argument, not just accusations. Even then, all evidence must be held lightly while always looking for counter-evidence, larger context, and alternative interpretations.

Empathy appears to be a good example of why to remain skeptical. We have to distinguish between spikes, trends, and cycles. For example, violent crime spiked in the 1970s to 1980s, as a result of childhood lead toxicity. Then it went down after environmental regulations were put into place. Something similar may have happened with empathy, whatever might be the cause in that case. The landmark study that showed declining empathy, once updated, later indicated a rise in empathy among the young, almost returning to the high levels of the 1970s.

“Changes in empathy over time in young Americans move in cycles and can go up and down. Most pertinently, both perspective taking (cognitive empathy) and empathic concern (emotional empathy) increased between 2008 and 2018, contradicting complaints that today’s youth lack empathy, and painting a more optimistic picture of late Millennials and Gen Z young adults” (Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Empathy Among Young Americans on the Rise).

The stereotypical narrative is that loss of empathy is driving narcissism (and individualism), largely because of online anonymity, selfies, main character syndrome, etc. It’s the claim that the egoic self is becoming stronger. But the supporting evidence is weaker than assumed. This is where Sanders gets some credit for a different kind of critique. Instead of narcissism, he thought it was the complete opposite, a weakening of individuated self-development. What was replacing it was what he considered to be pseudo-tribalism, the self being suppressed or stunted before it gets the chance to assert itself. That fits what some others suggest:

“The handwringing about narcissism misses the mark. The effects of our predicament do not promote grandiosity or the assertion of some imperial self. Something like the opposite seems to be the case. Studies going back decades suggest that self-image and “ego strength” have declined over time, while reported feelings of emptiness, uncertainty, and inadequacy have increased.⁴ Though largely unreported in the press, efforts to replicate the original claims for a “narcissism epidemic” have failed.⁵ And all the comparing that people do on social media does not boost self-confidence but undermines it.

“Narcissism is not a helpful category. If anything, beleaguered or demoralized might be better terms for the effects of our self ethic at the individual level” (Joseph E. Davis, Is There Truly an Epidemic of Narcissism?).

Many people, including experts, have speculated that social isolation and loneliness would cause falling empathy, rising narcissism. But the newer data forces us to question that: “Neither economic factors (such as the inflation rate or unemployment rate) nor worldview factors (such as trust in institutions or optimism about the future) explained these changes in empathy. Instead, changes in empathy were related to interpersonal dynamics, such as changes in how frequently people socialized and their feelings of loneliness. Empathy increased when socializing decreased and loneliness increased” (Alison Jane Martingano, Generation Empathy: The Surprising Surge of Compassion in Modern Youth).

One speculation is that, “It’s possible that being lonely acts like a ‘social hunger,’ driving people to seek out and empathize with others.” That might challenge Sanders’ view. It’s not clear, though, since I don’t know if he ever directly refers to empathy, sympathy, compassion, narcissism, egoism, etc — none of those terms are listed in the index. He does indirectly touch on this, if in other words. In arguing that the Nineties youth lacked interiority, they couldn’t recognize the interiority of others and so could show no moral concern for the lives of others — hence, their being drawn into violent gangs where life was cheap.

Sanders seemed to have an exaggerated view of how many GenXers were in gangs. Besides, it more likely had to do with childhood lead toxicity, childhood poverty, drug wars, zero tolerance policies, mass incarceration, etc than anything to do with media. If there was a rise in gang activity in the mid-1990s, the same had been seen in the mid-1800s, the late-1800s, the 1920s, and the 1960s — gangs were already in America by the 1700s (OJJDP, History of Youth Gangs; Wikipedia, Gangs in the United States; & gab1930s, Gangs: “1766 Early Manifestations of Gangs”).

I’m fairly sure literacy wasn’t ebbing and flowing alongside gang activity. The draw into gang life seems to go in a cycle, re-emerging every 30-40 years. There is no evidence, as far as I know, that connects it to a takeover of illiterate low-empathy narcissists. I doubt criminal activity and violence, individual or organized, has much of anything to do with media changes. Anyway, over the past several decades of secondary orality turning to tertiary orality, violent crime stats have mostly shown a steady downward trend, albeit Covid-19 caused a momentary blip.

By the way, about loneliness, that’s an interesting topic in and of itself. A number of scholars, such as Hannah Arendt, have argued that loneliness or something similar has been a major force whenever totalitarianism shows up. But it’s interesting that some research, as already mentioned, elicits empathy. I’m not sure what to make of that. All I can say is it seems to confound a lot of speculation that has been done. It sometimes feels like certain thinkers are trying to throw together everything bad that concerns them, and then look for the data to confirm their assumptions and conclusions.