Today, Explained - Ew, are we post-literate?

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

In this episode from last year, we explain how a return to orality is frying our politics and our brains. This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Jolie Myers and Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Denise Guerra, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you hear Wednesday's episode of today explained from Vox? We called it everything is clips now, because when you open up your social media and start scrolling, you've probably noticed that everything is clips, clips of podcasts, clips of TV shows, clips of movies, clips of sports. Our guests called the TLDRification of the entire internet. Because it kind of truncates everything we make, and it all goes down to,

we need a way for people to discover our content. And right now, the way to get people to discover the content is to make clips of it, no matter what it is. One of the things we're not doing when we're watching all those clips is reading. We made a show about that too. But we also, also, also made a show about what not reading is doing to our brains, our politics, and our potential to connect with each other now and in the future. And we're going to bring you that show once again today. Enjoy.

You're no longer young people. You're just people. And people are either productive or dead weight. It's my first day of work, and I need to make a big impression. Were you just checking me out? No. It's too bad. I see at least 15 ladies I need to talk to you before my beta block wears off.

My co-workers don't take me seriously. It's not a human. It's just a piece of meat. Someone bring a gurney. Take a look. It's in a book. Today, Explain from Vox here with Eric Levitts from Vox, talk about what we're doing instead of reading.

Yeah, well, so at the same time that reading is going down, the amount of time that Americans are spending on screens is going steadily up to record highs. This raises questions about how this really massive change is affecting the way that we think and the way that our culture and politics operate. And your piece focuses on some. something called orality. Help us understand what that is. So some analysts who have tried to answer this question of what is all this doing to us

have looked back to how the advent of literacy and the rise of book reading changed human consciousness and culture and what human consciousness and culture were like before literacy and before reading. A lot of this analysis is really rooted in this 1980. book Orality and Literacy by the philosopher Walter Ong. In that book, Ong argues that there are a few defining traits of communication in oral societies. One is that in an oral world, information needs to be verbally repeated in order to survive. So you need to speak in a way that is going to be enjoyable and easy to repeat.

And this leads to the heavy use of repetition in speech, the heavy use of formulaic lines, mnemonic devices and epithets. The law of the harvest is to reap more than you sow. Red sky at night, sailors to learn. Early bird gets the worm. Ivan the terrible. Alexander the Great. For example, in the Iliad, the Greek poet Homer, this is an oral epic,

always refers to Achilles as swift-footed Achilles, a phrase that helps the listener simultaneously have an easier time remembering who Achilles is, and also his sort of defining trait. So when they had assembled and were gathered together, swift-footed Achilles rose and spoke among them. Separately, in an oral society, communication always happens face to face or within, and often with an earshot,

and to Aung, this imbues discourse with a combative spirit, as every sort of spoken statement kind of doubles as a bid for status or social affirmation because people are watching and you're looking someone else in the face. All this makes orality less accommodating of abstract thought. You know, people can't isolate ideas from their social context or subjective experience. And that makes it difficult to formulate general rules or abstract categories or rules of logic.

And this book was written in 1982 long before we had Facebook or social media or anything. But some people look at this and say, hey, this kind of sounds familiar in our age of social media. There is a real emphasis on making your speech easy and enjoyable to repeat in the sense of whatever goes viral is kind of what is going to reach people's consciousness. Very demure, very mindful. It's about to be a white boy summer. What the hell? What the hell is it? It's not clocking to that I'm standing on business, is it?

People are now communicating through the spoken word, through podcasts like this one. Ritz today explained I'm Noel King. Through YouTube videos. Hi, I'm Noel King. People are communicating through speech and facial expressions, and even in our textual exchanges, with emojis, we're now re-approximating the nonverbal aspects of communication. Waving emoji, it's Noel, King Crown emoji. Put all this together, and some people argue that we have this, we're entering this age of digital orality. We're entering this new cultural moment that is distinctive, but recalls some of the aspects of the oral condition.

There's a lot to take in here, orally, but you're not talking about humanity or American culture regressing back to like the cavemen. You're talking about regressing back to an era where ideas, concepts, characters were chiefly communicated and conveyed through speech. Can you tell us what changed when reading and writing came along? How did that impact our capacity for thought? I believe on our reading episode we did last year, I'm going to say. Our guest, UCLA professor Marianne Wolfe, called reading. The closest thing to telepathy humans ever get. Yeah, and so all of this that I've been speaking about is kind of premised on a certain account of what writing and reading does to human consciousness and cultural.

And Marianne Wolf actually supplies a really important concept here, which is that there's a distinction between reading as in just processing written text and reading as in deeply engaging with a long form piece of writing. And it's that kind of reading specifically that is in decline. So that form of reading, that deep reading, there's this belief that the advent of it really enabled abstract thought and in fact inherently inspired it. text conjures this voice that speaks inside your head rather than through your ears. You encounter these ideas that are stripped from any immediate social circumstance, and you're encountering it just evaluating it in the privacy of your own head. Abstract thought allows us to formulate rules of physics. It allows us to formulate constitutions.

We are the people of the United States. monotheistic religions. I'm a lord thy God. So it helps to scale up human societies in terms of their cooperation, economically, and politically. And it makes the defining sort of rational enlightenment aspects of our culture possible, science, and liberal democracy. This anyway is the argument among proponents of this orality versus literacy kind of thesis. And a lot of people have looked at this concept of a reality as a way of understanding where our culture might be going. So we had this pre-literate age before people had ever encountered books and read text.

Then we had this literate age where books were really central to the culture. Now we're in this era where we're potentially leaving the age of literacy behind. It just feels like we have to bring up politics here. and talk about what impact orality is having on the way our world's being run right now. Critics of digital orality have attributed it as the driver of the rise of right-wing populism. You know, Donald Trump, arguably, is the most successful communicator of our social media age. and kind of like Homer, he references persons very often with an epithet. So instead of swift-footed Achilles or Wiley Odysseus, Trump talks about...

Lion Ted. He's Lion Ted. And sleepy Joe Biden. His communication style, obviously, is also very combative, very performative, always sort of a bid for dominance or status, et cetera. And so, you know, more broadly, these theorists argue that, Orality erodes commitment to these abstract principles of liberal democracy. Now, it could be that that's true. But in the piece, I raise a couple of, you know, complicating factors here. You know, I think that it's just not the case that the people who are most hostile to liberal democracy in our day and age are all universally poorly read people. You know, there's Peter Thiel.

Antichrist or Armageddon. Curtis Jarvin. The absolute normal form of government is monarchy. J.D. Vance. Have you said thank you once? Whatever else you think about them, they read a lot of books. They talk about books. You know, I think that a lot of the most prominent authoritarian leftists or Stalinists

generally weren't especially unacquainted with libraries. Often they were intellectuals. And so reading is no vaccine against having authoritarian, illiberal, ideas. It's reasonable to worry that the mental habits instilled by TikTok and chat GPT won't be as conducive to liberal democracy as the written word. That said, I think that this is really speculative, and I think that there's a lot of reasons to doubt that this change in human consciousness or culture, this return to an oral mode, is what's driving political dysfunction in the United States, as some of them suggest.

Okay, but one thing on which there is no ambiguity is that we are trending in one direction, which is reading less and watching more. And where is this heading? I mean, with what, the advent of AI and the fast creep of AI into every aspect of our lives, are we only to expect more orality, less literacy? You know, the one bit of caution that I put in a piece about this is just that there's always anxiety about new technologies and how they're going to change the way that humans think and communicate. So more than 2,000 years ago, Socrates was really worked up about the novel media technology of his day, writing. And he kind of decried it in much the same terms that people decry AI today, you know, addressing himself to the inventor of writing, the hypothetical. inventive writing, he said, You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding.

You provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. So, you know, you thought that being able to write things down, people won't have to memorize poems anymore, they're going to get dumber. I think there's more reason to be worried about AI than there was about writing in ancient Greece, but, you know, something worth keeping in mind. Eric Levitts wrote about orality for Vox.com.

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scroll in scroll in scroll in today explained is back with Adam Clark Estes senior technology correspondent here at box Adam in the first half of the show we talked about this idea of orality that our colleague Eric wrote about which has a lot to do it turns out with little videos are you a little video guy I don't think of myself as a little video guy I'm not a Big TikTok user. I enjoy them when they come across my screen, but what I've noticed over the course

the last months and years is that I actually can't escape the little videos. It's not just on TikTok. They're just little videos everywhere. It's a vertically oriented video. It's usually a short one. But if you're watching them on Spotify, it's maybe like a little music video. Hi, it's Charlie XX. Hey, y'all. This is Mon Escape. If you're watching on LinkedIn, it's maybe like a little a little motivational speech. Welcome to a day in the life of a work from home, entrepreneur, fractional exec and parent of two.

For a little like mini thing about work culture, I saw one where I learned the phrase peanut buttering. The idea that you apply the same tactics to all areas of a business. On shopping sites. This right here is going to be my go-to base. Make up in five minutes with five problems. But then on TikTok, it's an entertainment platform, right? Like, people go to TikTok to have fun and to zone out.

And some people do it too much. Why can't we look away from these things? Why are we so inclined to watch the next video and the next video after that? There are a couple answers to your question, Sean. One is the really simple one, which is that these products are designed to keep you engaged. TikTok is powered by an algorithm that is really good at not just giving you things that you will like, but giving you things that will surprise you. The other thing happening here is, you know, because of the way our brains work,

you know, if you look back to the primitive versions of ourselves, we used to be hunter-gatherers and our brains were designed to look for things. You can imagine a TikTok feed being sort of like a forest floor full of junk with like little berries sprinkled in between. Ooh, yummy. Every time we see something that we like or find a berry in that forest, we get a little hit of dopamine. This has also been described as kind of the slot machine effect

where we keep wanting to pull the lever to see if we're going to win the next time. And what is this doing to our brains? Because every time we pull the lever, some sounds go off, some pictures happen, and there's like an endorphin rush, right? Well, it's reinforcing that behavior. But if you're looking at kind of the longer term,

what it does to our attention span, researchers have found that our attention spans are shrinking. One of the sources I talked to from my story, Gloria Mark, she's a psychologist, who literally wrote the book on attention span. The book is called Attention Span. She found, she's been studying this for a couple decades, and she's found that since 2004, kind of like the length of time we've had the social internet, our attention spans have shrunk from about two and a half minutes to 47 seconds, which happens to also be the

average length of a TikTok video. And how much time are we spending watching these 47 second videos? One study I looked at showed that on average TikTok users spend 108 minutes on TikTok. That's about double what Instagram users spend on Instagram. So these videos are killing our attention spans slowly but surely, if not quickly, but surely. What's it doing for the rest of our health? Did you talk to anyone about that? I talked to a researcher who led a team in Germany that looked at memory.

In a study that they did, they found that TikTok is especially good at impairing your prospective memory. This is the to-do list in your head, the part of your brain that helps you remember to remember something. So they had them do a task, and they interrupted them in the middle of the task. and the researchers would let the subjects of the study look at TikTok or scroll Twitter, watch YouTube videos, or do nothing. And they found that those that looked at TikTok videos were 40% more likely to struggle with that initial task. So if you kind of like put this in a real world scenario, if I am sitting down trying to write an article for Vox and I get a little tired,

and I look at my phone and it's, you know, 10 minutes of TikTok. Ooh, yummy. And then I go back to what I was doing, I'm probably going to have a harder time remembering where my train of thought was or what point I was trying to make. And there's another thing, too, increased social media use has been linked to depression and anxiety, especially in young people.

It was a study along these lines where we got the term TikTok brain, which describes a brain that is not just having a hard time paying attention, but that is also actually anxious and prone to depression and just feeling bad. What's the end goal here, Adam? Did you figure that out while writing this piece? Is it to just have us watching little videos for the maximum amount of time in a given day with no clear purpose in mind? If you're meta or TikTok or Google, I think it's safe to say that the end goal is maximizing profits,

selling ads, keeping people engaged. So yeah, having people looking at these little videos for the greatest number of minutes possible, even if that starts eating into the time that they sleep. And I saw some research on this too, where actually some of these platforms are running up against that. People have to sleep. So how do they fight against that urge to sleep? But of course your piece is titled Little Videos Are Cooking Our Brains. importantly, your piece is not titled Little Videos Have Cooked Our Brains, We Are Cooked, There Is No Going Back. If I'm recalling correctly, you have some advice for people

who are maybe trying to fight the urge to just watch little videos all day. The psychologist Gloria Mark, who wrote the book on Attention Span, she told me that the number one thing is to take breaks. If you find yourself spending a lot of time looking at TikTok or scrolling through Reddit or Twitter or whatever, take a break. And usually when you do, you'll be able to kind of reclaim your time and get yourself out of that loop. It's a way to reflect on our actions. And by reflection, we can understand why we're doing things.

For me, it's usually because I am bored or I'm procrastinating. and when we're more intentional in our actions, we can form a plan. Another thing that she told me, picture yourself at the end of the day, where you want to be, what you want to get done. It is probably very likely that 108 minutes of TikTok watching is not part of that plan that you might have for your day when you wake up in the morning. An easy trick that people may have heard of is also just to make your phone more boring. That's what I have done. And it's been somewhat effective. You can set your screen to gray scale.

So as our technology has become more compelling and engaging, we have to become a little bit more proactive about pulling ourselves away from it. And a cool thing about books is like you can read from like page one to like page 436 and not encounter a single ad anywhere in the text. That is one of my favorite things about books, whether it's learning about the history of the Roman Empire or reading a novel that helps me escape into a, a world of sci-fi. Whatever you like in a story, you can find it in a book. I think that's from the Reading Rainbow song. But it doesn't have to be books. It can be anything.

It can be gardening. It can be going outside. It can be playing with your kids. A lot of us do want to keep our phones with us all the time. And by making those devices more boring, we're less tempted by the little videos that are everywhere. Take a scroll, it's a TikTok hole, it's another another, another, another, another that'll be you in this rainbow.

Peter Balin-on-Rosen made this show some time ago. Back then, he was edited by Jolie Myers and Amina Alsathi. We were fact-checked by Denise Guerra, and the show was mixed by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristen's daughter. Haven't said that in a while. These days, the team includes Abyshi, Artsy, Kelly, Wedder, Hattie Mawagi, Daniel Hewitt, Miles, Brian, Ariana Spurru, David Tattachore, Miranda Kennedy, Dustin DeSoto, Gabriel Donatav, and Noel King.

We use music by Breakmaster's Scylinder, and on this one, a little music by Dean Antonio. I'm Sean Ramos from Today Explain is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. For more information about that network, go to podcast.com or Google it. You can listen ad-free by signing up at vox.com slash members.