Video by var.aunevik

Are we going back to oral culture? Picture this. You wake up and immediately put on the news. Driving to work, you listen to an episode of your favorite podcast. Lunch is served with a YouTube video TED Talk. Your workday is full of voice messages and meetings that could, and probably should, have been an email. The only thing that you actually read all day were subtitles and the

coffee menu at Black Street. Even when you text your mom, it sounds spoken. And for most of history, this was the norm. People didn't read because they couldn't. They talked and listened. And if you can't write anything down, there's only one place to keep what you know, inside your own head. So the

stories had to be designed to stick, which is why the oldest epics have both rhyme and rhythm, so they could be remembered and recited together. Later, when writing came, we could finally put ideas outside our heads and onto a page. We could build long arguments and complex ideas. Now again, it feels like we're drifting back. Everything is conversational. We are returning to oral culture,

or at least so it seems. Only now, we don't have to remember anything at all. It can all be stored in the cloud or in your Snapchat memories. And the togetherness of learning is not communal. The content pushed from my screen to yours. It has the look of people around a campfire, only without the fire and without the people.