"Anna Dwight Weir Reading a Letter" by Julian Alden Weir, here.

I read, often, that digital life is a return to orality. Behind this thought stands the towering figure of Walter Ong, a brilliant thinker—and a mentor to high priest of media studies, Marshall McLuhan. (But don't take my word for it.)

But in the oral cultures Ong wrote about, stories are shared efforts. So I've never quite understood the notion that our "post-literate" digital life, mediated as it is by "just-for-you" algorithms represents any kind of return. (Something Ong himself recognized in his discussion of so-called secondary orality.)

In a dispatch for The Drift, Sam Adler-Bell gives this thought better words:

Of course, the modern world has not returned to a pre-Gutenberg state. Our dismal expressive present resembles a peculiar synthesis of spoken and textual cultures, reacquiring certain features of pre-literate life without shedding the individualism, acquisitiveness, and introversion characteristic of the print era. We get tribe without community, emotional cathexis without sociality, balladeers without poetry. We’re alone together.

These days, the only thing we're together in, it sometimes seems, is our aloneness. Perhaps that can be an opportunity. ❧