Ew, are we post-literate?

0:00Did 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 guest called it the TLDRification of the entire internet. it. 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.

0:41We 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.

0:59Support for the show comes from Hostinger. Ever had an idea for a business or side hustle, but never actually launched it? With Hostinger, you can turn that idea into something real in minutes instead of weeks. Hostinger is an all-in-one platform that brings everything into one place. Your domain, website, email marketing, AI tools, and AI agents. You can create websites, online stores, and custom apps with simple prompts. Then, use AI agents to automate tedious tasks and grow your business. Go to hostinger.com slash vox to bring your idea online for under$3 a month. Plus, get an extra 20 % off with promo code vox.

1:40Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at The Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the Nexgrill 4 Burner Gas Grill on special buy for only$199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove 7 Piece Outdoor Dining Set for only$499. This Memorial Day, get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th through May 27th. US only exclusions apply. See Home Depot dot com slash price match for details.

2:16Today, Explained from Vox here with Eric Levitz from Vox to 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 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.

3:12A lot of this analysis is really rooted in this 1982 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 delight. Early bird gets the worm.

3:55Ivan 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 Ong, 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.

4:46All 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.

5:28Very demure, very mindful. It's about to be a white boy somewhere. What the hell? What the hell is it? It's not clocking to that I'm standing on business, is it? Yeah! People are now communicating through the spoken word, through podcasts like this one. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Through YouTube videos. Hi, I'm Noelle King. And as we celebrate... 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 Noelle. King crown emoji. Put all this together, and some people argue that we have this...

6:05We'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.

6:55Our guest, UCLA professor Marianne Wolfe, called reading. The closest thing to telepathy humans ever get. Yeah. 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 culture. And Marianne Wolfe 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.

7:47Text 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. Monotheistic religions. 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.

8:48And a lot of people have looked to this concept of orality 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.

9:37You 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 wily Odysseus, Trump talks about lion Ted. He's lion Ted. Crooked Hillary. And sleepy Joe Biden. Come on, man. His communication style, obviously, is also very combative, very performative, always sort of a bid for dominance or status, etc. 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.

10:24But 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 Yarvin. 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.

11:05Often they were intellectuals. And so reading, you know, is no vaccine against having authoritarian, illiberal ideas. it's reasonable to worry that the mental habits instilled by TikTok and ChatGPT 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.

11:54And 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 the 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.

12:25some 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 inventor of 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.

13:01So, 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.

13:26Eric Levitz wrote about orality for Vox.com. When we return on Today Explained, we're going to talk about what got us here. Those pesky little videos.

14:02Support for the show today comes from Vant. If you're a business owner, you may have noticed a shift recently. Risk and regulation are increasing, but before they sign anything, customers now expect clear proof of security. Building that trust is essential to closing deals, and that's what we're all about. closing deals, but it's also complex, expensive, and time-consuming. Vanta says they can automate that process to bring compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SOC 2, and who isn't, or running an enterprise GRC program, I know a lot of you are, Vanta keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving.

14:43This helps companies get compliant fast and remain compliant in the future, opening doors to huge growth opportunities and freeing up your valuable time. You can get started at vanta.com slash explained. That is V-A-N-T-A dot com slash explained. Vanta.com slash explained.

15:09Support for the show comes from Chime. Banking can sometimes feel like you're playing a game of dodgeball. Love dodgeball. Doing everything in your power to not get hit with overdraft fees, minimum balance requirements, and monthly fees. Don't love that. Chime wants to help. They say that they're approaching things differently and changing the way people bank. Chime says they are offering you the most rewarding fee-free banking, banking built for you. Why pay to get your own money? They're not looking to charge you overdraft and or monthly fees, and they have thousands of fee-free ATMs for you to use built for you, not the 1%.

15:42Take that 1%. Chime members can even benefit from up to$1 ,150 in annual rewards fee free plus direct deposit unlocks the most rewarding way to bank at Chime. Chime says they're not just smarter banking, they're the most rewarding way to bank. You can join the millions who are already banking fee free today. It just takes a few minutes to sign up. Head to chime.com slash explained. That's chime.com slash explained. Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services for MyPay and Chime card provided by Chime's bank partners. Optional products and services may have fees or charges. Stated annual percentage yield and cash back for Chime Prime only.

16:13No minimum balance required. Checking account ranking based on a J.D. Power survey published October 20, 2025. For more information on APY rates, MyPay, SpotMe, and travel perks, go to chime.com slash disclosures.

16:26Support for the show today comes from Framer, not Farmer for those of you with bad eyesight. These days, if you're a business owner, you need to have a website that can actually help your business grow. And with Framer, you can do it quickly and easily. Framer is a website builder that works like your team's favorite design tool with real-time collaboration or robust CMS with everything you need for great SEO and advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing. Your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot-com from day one. Changes to your Framer site go live to the web in seconds with one click without help from engineering which can help your team reduce dependencies and reach escape velocity.

17:07That sounds cool. You can learn how you can get more out of your.com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash explain for 30 % off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash explain for 30 % off framer.com slash explain. Rules and restrictions may apply.

17:35Today Explained is back with Adam Clark Estes, a senior technology correspondent here at Vox. 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 of 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.

18:13It'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 XCX. Hey, y 'all, this is Monas King. If you're watching on LinkedIn, it's maybe like 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. Makeup in five minutes with five products.

18:52But then on TikTok, it's an entertainment platform, right? 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.

19:37You 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.

20:02And what does this do into 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 for my story, Gloria Marks, 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 of 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.

20:52And 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. Wow. 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.

21:41So 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.

22:32And 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.

23:32So 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.

24:13And 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.

24:55An 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 grayscale. 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 you can read from page 1 to 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.

25:36Or reading a novel that helps me escape into a world of sci-fi.

25:45Whatever 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.