{"id":5,"title":"Together in our aloneness","slug":"together-in-our-aloneness","body":"![Anna Dwight Weir Reading a Letter](/images/5)\r\n_\"Anna Dwight Weir Reading a Letter\" by Julian Alden Weir, [here](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/13176)._\r\n\r\n<span class=\"dropcap\">I read, often,</span> 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](https://samkriss.substack.com/p/reading-is-magic).)\r\n\r\nBut 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.)\r\n\r\nIn [a dispatch](https://www.thedriftmag.com/alone-together/) for _The Drift_, Sam Adler-Bell gives this thought better words:\r\n\r\n> 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.\r\n\r\nThese days, the only thing we're together in, it sometimes seems, is our aloneness. Perhaps that can be an opportunity.","createdAt":"2026-04-21T10:59:37.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-04-21T11:03:58.000Z","tags":[{"id":25,"name":"post-literacy","type":"topic"}],"artifacts":[{"id":12,"title":"Alone Together","originUrl":"https://www.thedriftmag.com/alone-together/","hostname":"www.thedriftmag.com","year":2026,"type":"article","createdAt":"2026-04-21T10:43:21.000Z","tags":[{"id":19,"name":"the drift","type":"publication"},{"id":20,"name":"sam adler-bell","type":"author"}]},{"id":13,"title":"Reading is magic","originUrl":"https://samkriss.substack.com/p/reading-is-magic","hostname":"samkriss.substack.com","year":2026,"type":"article","createdAt":"2026-04-21T10:52:32.000Z","tags":[{"id":21,"name":"numb at the lodge","type":"publication"},{"id":22,"name":"sam kriss","type":"author"}]},{"id":14,"title":"Anna Dwight Weir Reading a Letter","originUrl":"https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/13176","hostname":"www.metmuseum.org","year":1890,"type":"painting","createdAt":"2026-04-21T10:58:21.000Z","tags":[{"id":23,"name":"julian alden weir","type":"author"}]},{"id":15,"title":"Orality and Literacy","originUrl":"https://bookshop.org/p/books/orality-and-literacy-30th-anniversary-edition-walter-j-ong/d943fdcf8b86560a?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=dsa_nonbrand&utm_content={adgroupname}&utm_term=aud-2151538068632:dsa-19959388920&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=12440232635&gclid=CjwKCAjwwJzPBhBREiwAJfHRnbYf9d2gdFFcqDNaybtMPoj9JytFxgrx_m4p-Qh9bakERY-Q_vpcmBoCi1MQAvD_BwE","hostname":"bookshop.org","year":1982,"type":"book","createdAt":"2026-04-21T11:01:05.000Z","tags":[{"id":24,"name":"walter ong","type":"author"}]}]}