Why can't we talk to each other? (Part 2)
Note: This is the second installment of two. Catch up on the first by visiting the embedded link below, or scroll down further to continue.
I. The Confusion of Languages
II. Our Endless Subcultures
III. We Have Never Been Literate
IV. The Oral Culture of Online Life (continued)
V. Old Wine In New Wineskins
VI. The Danger
VII. Inverting the Pyramid
In Part 1, we had just finished perfecting the idea of a society dominated by a scrambled form of both old-world orality and modern literacy, strained through the intensely saturated medium of the Internet. But this is only a theory. In practice, what kind of media would grow up that plays on and exploits this niche?
The archetypal example of this form is one I am sure we have all experienced: the short-form vertical video. Notably, this video is usually quite short. Often running only a few seconds or no more than a minute, it is a visually intense experience, packing as much as possible into a short format and small screen.
While these videos really could be anything, I want to focus on the informational type of video. These aren’t the videos to learn what the latest dances the youths are doing, or to discover a new recipe. They are where you learn about the world, current events, culture, philosophy, or science. A typical example features a human in portrait style, talking into the camera, often with a habit of dramatic single-hand gestures to emphasize their point. (Is this oral culture?) It also typically has overlaid captions to overcome volume controls, or it splices in large volumes of text from third parties to bolster its point. (Is this literate culture?) It is often a mash-up; audio, video, text, image, and graphics are overlaid on the screen. It is edited in a jarring, anxiety-inducing fashion, chopping what might be an ordinary monologue into a clipped stream of words in which there are no breaths or pauses. And if you swipe your finger up, you get another one, launching without preamble into a breathless disquisition on some other topic.
The content of these short-form videos can really be anything. Indeed, the infinite video feed tends to jump wildly between topics or concepts the algorithm has decided will keep you interested. The feed is designed to keep you on the platform as long as possible, and so the order and pace of videos are optimized to take you in looping paths through various topics of your interest, occasionally sprinkling in farther-flung content if it thinks that will keep you watching. The viewer ends up in an all-you-can-eat buffet of information, presented without context. These videos are hyper-fixated on capturing your attention past the first two or three seconds because its creator knows it will lose your attention otherwise. We may look through this medium to illuminate the outside world, but it is less a telescope than a kaleidoscope, dazzling us with its infinite interlocking patterns but giving us only shards of the view around us. One is forgiven for walking away from an extended exposure to these informational videos with more impressions than concepts, more vague senses than thoughts.
The short-form infinite video feed is a perfect chimera of our ancient oral substrate and the new gloss that literacy has put over our mind. It captures the powerful draw that narratives, heroes, villains, authority, gravity, repetition, voice, and applause have on us. But it delivers them as concentrated micro-doses, extracted from the inconvenient kludge of an actual community grounded in the inconvenient constraints of the human lifeworld. And it activates our reflexive self-consciousness, our ruminative tendencies, the insatiable desire for frozen memories left in us by literacy in the same manner. It moves too quickly for us to digest to digest and leaves us only with fleeting impressions. And it is by far the predominant source of information of all kinds—news, wisdom, entertainment, advice, instruction, prophecy—for the modern American.
V. Old Wine In New Wineskins
Social media is volatile because it interacts both with our nature—our inclination toward orality, and nurture—our intense and lifelong training in literacy. Writing about television, radio, and newspaper, Ong already referred to the phenomenon of modern culture and communication as 'secondary orality'. I contend that the secondary orality of social media differs somewhat from what Ong described in 1982. He identified mass media as the progenitor of the 'global village;’ a shared universal consciousness. Social media has instead created what we might call a globe of villages each containing its own bespoke consciousness.
Our globe now is like one of the bundles of fiber-optic cables that crisscrosses it to make social media possible: densely packed, infinitely various, parallel and non-intersecting, conveying high-fidelity information at the speed of light across the globe.
Sure, you may say, but isn't this progress? Wasn't the global village too big, too totalizing, deracinated and anodyne, its information ecosystem stultifying and undemocratic? Perhaps. But if we are all returning to villages, the latter is not like the former, and so it can hardly be called a return.
One of the illustrative differences between traditional oral cultures and new, digitally-mediated online communities is that these online cultures lack the durability and stability of traditional cultures. Traditional oral cultures were highly durable against conflict because they were able to adapt. First, the hierarchical nature of discipleship and apprenticeship made it so that there was a very high continuity between generations of information and leadership. There was less absolute change in the informational ecosystem of a culture from generation to generation. They moved slower and more carefully.
Second, oral cultures could freely pivot to accommodate new information by strategically 'forgetting' outdated, incorrect, or disfavored information and proceeding as if nothing had changed. And critically, oral cultures had a governor or limit state in how 'wrong' or incoherent their shared wisdom could get: oral culture was tightly tied to the immediate natural world, and so was tightly bound up with reality as it was immediately experienced by its participants. The information environment could never quite escape the natural world because it was embedded in it and subject to its verification.
Most importantly, these oral cultures were totalizing. They wrapped the entire individual, encompassing their daily life with a consistency and uniformity that was warm and protective, even if it was stuffy.
The spontaneous communities of secondary orality differ from these traditional cultures in every respect. First, there is no applicable concept of discipleship or apprenticeship. Instead, social media's hierarchies are built on engagement. Whatever communication gains the most attention is the dominant narrative within that media ecosystem, eschewing any form of continuity between elders and youthful upstarts.
Second, no one ever forgets anything on the Internet. Traditional cultures maintained unity by 'rewriting' (or perhaps re-speaking is better) history when it had to adapt. Online cultures, on the other hand, simply split when they reach these inflection points into ever-thinner bands of factional antagonists with seemingly limitless memory about the wrongs and errors of their former brethren.
Unlike physical communities bound tightly to the natural world, digital communities have the remarkable quality of drifting ever-farther from real life the longer and more tight-knit the digital culture remains together. “Very Online” ideologues recognize this and encourage this drift explicitly, speaking of shifting the Overton window with tactics designed to drag their followers further and further from the stubbornly “normie” real world. This is only possible in an information ecosystem where the real world is simply not as salient anymore.
And most importantly, these spontaneous communities are all only fragments. One may be part of three or five or ten, living at the intersection of a Venn diagram resembling not a circle but a shard. You can never fully belong to any one of them because none of them were built to contain all of you. Thus you may find your neighbor navigating via GPS while insisting that the world is flat, or prescribing you healing crystals attuned to your star sign for your indigestion while dutifully taking a doctor-prescribed antibiotic if they have an infection. Have you ever felt the disorientation of going from one of these fragmentary life-worlds to another, like stepping off of a moving train? Have you ever felt how shallow and provisional your membership in one of these bespoke communities is?
VI. The Danger
Babel remains confounded. We often find ourselves speaking words that others can recognize, but that is no guarantee our meaning is conveyed absent a common and shared sense of the world. Social media algorithms make it easy for us to find people online who do understand, however. Few things are as gratifying as understanding, and being understood, and so these bespoke strands of the Internet can provide us with the fleeting feeling of solidarity. But our self-isolation into ephemeral and disembodied communities never requires us to do the hard work of listening and translating. Atrophied by disuse, our capacity for tolerance, patience, and curiosity is exhausted when we encounter each other offline.
Unavoidably this means that some real-world communities and relationships will shatter even as digital ones seem to fill the void. We will end up with fewer friends and less in common with the people around us. We may also receive lower-quality and less trustworthy information from these shared worlds, or at the very least feel a creeping sense of disorientation as our body of knowledge veers ever further from that held by others.
In part this is because the economy of social media uses attention as a currency. We know better than to assume that engagement corresponds well with trustworthiness. Too often, trustworthy just means reinforces my assumptions, makes me feel good, and seems right because much of the information is difficult to verify. Consider the pop-psychological parenting advice common on social media and especially in these short-form videos. If I take this advice with my own children now, wouldn't many of the effects of this advice on them be hidden for five, ten, twenty, or fifty years, far beyond the time when that validation can have any effect?
And social media has the quality of creating its own informational environment, where within that context you can easily verify a commentator's trustworthiness because it conforms to your understanding of world. Of course, that world is nothing more than the digital life-world of your algorithmically-generated feed. And this world is not real in any sense, but a digital system trained to give you more of the content you pay attention to already. The effect of this can be a self-reinforcing spiral that draws you ever-deeper into a digital environment which is internally consistent, but at odds with reality as it strays further away from it.
This drift can and does make people feel like they are living a double life, that their real-world life and online life interact with each other less and less. It is confusing and jarring when your real life and Internet life contradict each other, or when the philosophical presuppositions you share with a tight-knit online community clash with the beliefs someone in their your real life brings to the table. The feeling that the online world is an unreal one, some kind of simulated fantasy world, is also what makes so many of the vices of online living easier to slip into. Cyberbullying and cyberstalking, viewing online pornography, lying or exaggerating for the sake of engagement, and belligerent and argumentative online spats are all possible in part because people treat this digital reality like a game, a simulated world with no real impacts on you or anyone else.
If you are so inclined, consider also how AI makes it easy to manufacture text, images, audio, and video, the four pillars of Internet content. If you think digital communities are drifting too far away from reality already, hold on tight. This double life will feel more and more real, even as it has less and less to do with the world as it actually is.
VII. Inverting the Pyramid
Think of the communities you are part of like they comprise a pyramid. The wide base of the pyramid is the most important: it hosts the deepest and strongest connections you have, both to others and to bedrock assumptions about what is true, good, and beautiful. As you travel up the pyramid, you reach more and more peripheral communities, individuals, and truths. The width of the pyramid depicts an ever-receding quantity of trust: who do you trust most, and whose communication, information, wisdom, and advice do you build your life on?
Anyone drawing out their ideal 'trust pyramid' will likely come up with some thoughtful answers that span foundation to tip. And I encourage you to undertake this exercise! But once you have it all written out, start another one. This time, array these centers of trust not where they ought to be, but where they actually are in the lived-out practice of your life.
You can roughly gauge this in a few ways. First, with whom do you spend the most time? I mean this physically as well as digitally, and not just via social media but via news, entertainment, and institutions in general. Second, carefully judge your emotional responses to different centers of trust. Whose words do you examine most critically? Who do you reflexively distrust and only grudgingly agree with? Who raises your hackles? On the other hand, what social media profiles do you scroll by that cause you to pause and read carefully, hanging on every word? What publishers or institutions have enough of your trust that you stop paying attention to whether what they are saying is true because you can already assume it is? Between your ought pyramid and your is, you may add in some names or institutions and remove some, but it will almost certainly be different.
How differently would you spend your time, your attention, and your resources if that pyramid of trust were built the way you know it should be? I will make some observations about the base of my own ought pyramid that I hope prove edifying. First, the base is slow. It contains loci of trust thousands of years old; ones which have stood the test of time against every changing tide of history. Second, the base is close. It contains both those who are physically and relationally close to me. Finally, the base is tested. The people I put there are ones I have known long enough to have evaluated the application of their wisdom on their own lives as well as my own. The institutions (and there are a few) who find their way toward the base are likewise those whose track record is long and positive.
You may notice that these characteristics make the development of a shared language easier and more resilient against the tumult of fast media. The long and slow development of institutions, texts, and pillars of wisdom gives time for shared culture to develop around it. The proximity of other speakers of this shared language makes it easy to practice. And requiring of these old and close loci of trust that they also have a track record of success keeps them honest and durable.
We require too much of our social media. It was never going to be able to develop or sustain durable community. At best, I see it as the tip of that pyramid: a volatile Petri dish to be handled with care and used sparingly. It is like the rapid center of a river that can rocket you along the course, but also capsize you without warning. Treating it with this kind of experimental looseness, and not giving it enough time or attention to crumble my pyramid, is really the only way to use the medium that has worked for me. Allowing it, or any other person or institution who does not deserve it, to earn my trust has sheared both my language and attention away from the real and near people and institutions who do deserve it. We have a profound distortion in our shared language. Perhaps inverting the centers of our trust can rebuild it.