Interesting. But the Guthenberg parenthesis might be stretched. Before him, written texts did circulate, albeit in lower volumes.
For religious people, particulalry the "religions of the Book", the text is actually indispensable (at least to priests etc).
I am not sire about the full disapearance of reading, albeit Orwell and Huxley also foresaw it.
I am also skeptical about the next step. Goimg bqck to oral forms of knowledge? How oral is a LLM? Also technology has changed the landscape, therefore if no more writing, we are unlikely to go back to a world of shaman, griots and druids. My poi t is we may lose both: humanity (oral cultures, already gone) and intellect.
Or there will be a two-tiered society. A minority (privileged) who still reads, and masses reduced to borborygms (Orwell).
I agree with you reading is great. But the somewhat deconstructionist view that it will be gone soon (and not without good reasons, realistically people read less and less and less and less well) does seem concerning. Brave new world not so sure.
Ultimately cultivating reading and writing should be encouraged. All neuroscientists and commensensical peopke know the benefits of reading, particularly paper books.
Contrarian view maybe, but that's my take at least.
The primary concern for me is mass amnesia. Sure, oral traditions edited and modified, but slowly and intently. What the internet creates is episodic and temporary. There is no collective memory being passed down from elders, which is what you could say was the purpose of books originally - other than record keeping.
The real concern will be when amnesia is institutionalized. This will lead us to immature humans “doomed to repeat history because they didn’t learn from it”. And thus a collapse.
Look up the internet historians. He is one of many folks who focus on retelling the history of the internet specifically, and its intersection with reality. You could argue he falls into oral tradition, but videos are unchanging, searchable, and persistent phenomenon hosted by stable corporations in physical databases. People are good at remembering their stories and telling them. What's different now is that our canvas feels infinite. The microcosm you inhabit is worlds away culturally, yet a single google search will transport you there. If anything, you might feel this way because you and I lack a literacy that future generations will possess. I
I feel much in line with Henri Dharma’s comment however: Gutenberg did not invent writing, he invented a way to mass-produce written text. However, some people still write letters by hand, no in spite of the additional effort, but because of it. In the same way, social media is a new way of communicating that comes in addition. However, all this technology is based on thousands of pages of written text; just look at the gigantic technical documentation needed to maintain a social media infrastructure like TikTok!
We may end up with a two-tiered society, but at least the means to educate oneself should remain available, and perhaps the imbalance will swing back ?
yes, and I'd add that LLMs are not oral, they are pretty much text-based. The difference between the pre-Gutenberg era and now is that many things uttered in digital form are preserved (even though governments might not like it, or perhaps rather they want to hoard this data, but keep it to themselves).
The existence of this thoughtful reply is a mode of conversation and a strong implication that the argument is flawed.
It’s not binary. It flows. Books are written to respond to books. It’s just slower than talking.
Socrates was wrong about writing and reading—if he ever really did think it and didn’t change his mind. The rich communication is more complex and beautiful than Plato could capture.
This reminded me of the quote at the beginning of Chernobyl:
“What is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and settle instead for stories?”
Full quote here:
"What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then?
What is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and settle instead for stories?
In these stories, it doesn’t matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is: 'Who is to blame?'"
the ‘Gutenberg parenthesis’ theory is merely the name of a phase in humanity’s ongoing attempt to advance truth. Written text and is dissemination catalyse and enforce this drive.
The articles frenzied ideas that truth doesn’t matter apparently because lots of people don’t seem to care when consuming text is a desperate one.
I am sure I could write a book on this subject ... but who would read it. I sit writing surrounded by books. Taking the arrival of the smart phone as the beginning of the end, the closing of the parentheses, I spent my first 75 years in the culture of text. I taught in schools for many years. The decline in reading was apparent years ago, but became precipitous only in the last 15 years. Where is it going? Pre-literate? Oral culture? Truth and fact as words with meanings fixed generationally? What of the prodigious memory of the digital media, the internet? Questions to which I have no firm answers or even tenuous speculations. Books and reading will not disappear, at least not in any imaginable time span, but what superstition and myth might. accrete around them. Book burning has a long history. No need to pursue this. Think merely of Fahrenheit 451 or A Canticle for Leibowitz. Text will survive as Henri Dharma says. The existence of digital media adds a level of complexity and argues for a separation into a textually literate class, a digitally literal class, and a class that exists in the oral while possessing vestigial literacy. My speculations will soon disappear over the horizon so best to stop before they become risible. One last fact, I feel more and more like an alien in this world that is aborning.
This is interesting but I don’t fully agree. Even though transmedation tends to break hypermedia or make communication appear as though it weren’t mediated, the medium is still the conductor; be it text, video, image—which we can reread, rewatch, and resee, to reinterpret many times—or oral. We can tell a story many times and in different instances either intentionally or unintentionally changing it, and the reason is that language is also media, and as such it impacts fluidity as well. Because we must learn the language others speak to communicate with them, and that breaks or drifts us away from other forms of communication that are mediated by other forms of expression. But this doesn’t mean they disappear, although they might dissipate, because knowledge is cumulative. Meaning that even if the “printed text” parenthesis closes, it is contained within the brackets of language, which is contained within the brace of communication and so on…so it is a part within a bigger part of a part of something else.
Parenthesis is the metaphor you used, so saying it must close is circular logic youve imposed. You could just as easily argue that all phenomenon are parentheses since all phenomenon must end. The human parenthesis will close long before the earth parenthesis will close, which surely must be long before the sun parenthesis finally closes. Are you arguing that this phenomenon of great literary works will close in our lifetime or just that it will cease at all? I feel, if anything, that discerning readers will be in greater demand than ever in the coming decades, for the very reasons you mentioned: consuming slop let's people become twisted up in illogical group think, while good readers will persevere towards cogent and rational understandings of reality, thus giving them a leg up.
As I read this I kept thinking about Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, where they put out the fire by flooding the compartment with oxygen. In the early 90s I can remember writing letter was “a big deal”. Checked by a superior, combed over, corrected, rewritten. Then email arrived and the flood gates open. Just like the oxygen, the flood put the fire out. What also came with this hyper literacy was the crossover from academia into the mainstream, for example gender theory, where complex and nuanced ideas need to be reduced to sound bites woefully incapable of addressing the details.
When social positioning, rather than the details, becomes the point , a TikTok video is going to beat a rigorous thesis every time.
When you enter a world where “you didn’t write what you wrote” becomes the norm, that closed parenthesis feels a step.
Still, this was great. Glad you wrote it instead of doing a short.
But what makes you (or Pettit) so sure that the Gutenberg Parenthesis is ending, or that it is a “Parenthesis” to begin with?
Yes, we live in an age where information can be freely transmitted, absorbed and appreciated in verbal, oral and written form with a speed and efficiency that is historically unprecedented thanks to the internet, but that does not necessarily mean that one cannot isolate specific written portions of text within the contextual framework of their contemporaneous origin point.
Even in the past ten years, the culture of netizens’ behaviour with regards to social issues and what was previously considered common knowledge has transformed immensely.
You can easily find examples of what I’m talking about by using internet archiving services, such as the WayBack Machine, or even by looking through the comments section of popular videos on Youtube from years (or decades ago).
Times change, and people change. But no matter what innovations the internet has since wrought on this earth, there will always be fixed evidence–artefacts of the cultural changes that took place, which record a fixed imprint of these changes for posterity. Let me give you one specific example of this:
This video was one that went viral, way back in March 2014. The video depicts a woman in the audience of BBC Panel Discussions show, Question Time, who takes a hardline stance against Gay Marriage (it was only just legalised at the time), which at the time, was a controversial and offensive thing to hear to most people, both offline, and online.
And if you see the comments (Top Comments) in that video, you will see plenty of evidence of this. The vast majority of Top Comments (most of which date from 6-8 years ago) are highly critical of her, accusing her of being a 'bigot', a 'homophobe’ strawmanning her position as extreme, telling her that her beliefs are not reasonable simply because they are traditional, and that her discomfort at Gay Marriage is not enough of a justification for Gay Marriage to not be allowed.
But, as anyone who spends time online and has observed cultural trends from then since will point out, there has been a tremendous cultural shift in the decade since. The vast majority of comments calling out this woman for her uncompromising views would be accused of ‘virtue signalling’, and ‘degenerate’ nowadays.
And to see evidence of this, simply click the 'New Comments’ button, and you will see very different comments arguing a different position. People will agree with her, saying that she is entitled to her opinion, nobody should be bullied into holding different views held by a minority, even one saying that Gay Marriage is a ‘sin against God’.
And this, by the way, is to say nothing about the memes I have seen on Tiktok and Instagram that are highly derogatory towards trans people and homosexuals.
My point from this is, even in this day and age of fluid communication and memetics, you will find fixed, recorded evidence with timestamps that evidences a cultural environment of attitudes and mores that were prevalent at the time they were made. This means, you can use these comments (and other online literature) to gague, for posterity, what opinions and views were widely held at a certain point, and certain idiomatic phrases and memes which were highly context-specific can be tracked across time.
I agree with the spirit of this conclusion, but suggest it undermines your conclusion. Famously, "modern day sewage systems and clean water have eradicated more disease and saved more lives than all the doctors ever born"
Infrastructure and plumbing are wildly underrated because things that work tend to become invisible (ready-to-hand).
Perhaps the same is true of the literate age. *Still* underrated.
This parallels a lot of Neil Postman's work, particularly The Disappearance of Childhood and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Postman was a student of McLuhan, but was less aphoristic and more rooted in the humanities and the practice of education. I highly recommend looking into his work.
At the midpoint of the Gutenberg Parenthesis we saw “lastness” emerge as a popular literary trope, like the Lay of the Last Minstrel, with respect to oral literature and lifeways. To that end, articles like this one aren’t just analyzing history but are historical indications that a new lastness is nigh—elegy for nearly dead, remediated media.
As a poet, I find relief in the idea that long-broken publishing models may soon come crashing down like so much else we've come to think of as institutionally valuable. A pre-literary sensibility, one that "values the fluid, oral, performative, and communal," sounds like a sensibility we'll desperately need in an exponentially more fluid future. My own writing practice has moved from the book form (no offense to my publisher W. W. Norton) to podcasting, in order to demonstrate a new kind of collaborative, healing poetry-making, with audio as the endgame, not print. The show, There's a Poem in That, may offer a glimpse into what a post-parenthesis poetics might look like.
Interesting read, I appreciate your writing style and insights. To add to this, I think that the faith and trust one has in their information is also critically important to consider throughout history. If the only access you had to information came from the local bard, sharing it via a portal tradition, that is all you had and you have no choice but to remain satisfied with this. Mass literacy and abundance of printed knowledge quickly convinced generations to trust “the written text.” It took effort and skill to write a book, or a script or a scientific article. There was often peer review, or a publisher who read it and deemed it worthy of print. Written word often meant more correctness, consistency and uniformity. Yet, the “Dear Abby” section still existed. It represented, I would suggest, a continued longing for that oral tradition. For that personal 1:1 oral form of wisdom sharing that did not require citations or certifications to verify what they said. Then, around the year 2000 the pendulum quickly moved in a matter of one decade. The internet, smart phones, blogs, social media, made written words cheap and often meaningless. What you read most of the time is opinion, not fact checked, very biased and often inaccurate. The average person also doesn’t have the time or expertise to figure out which part of the written word is even accurate anymore? So, the reaction to this is two fold. Find another medium to get truth. Most people would rather hear an oral explanation on a YouTube video or Reel (much more like the oral tradition). At least the forces a real person to stand behind their words (as opposed to the hidden and masked authors of text). People are using memes and visuals to try and express themselves. The scary part is about what is next. AI is starting to disrupt trust in almost all forms of communication. Soon the population at while will question if every video, photo, quote, or song is even made by a human (let alone if it is accurate). Ironically, this might fully close the parenthesis. As has been stated by others, we might get to the point where we can only trust the humans in our close orbits again. Calling grandparents to hear their personal opinion. Asking a neighbor (instead of the internet) for advice on how to fix something. We may pivot from the written word not because it “served its purpose” but because it has lost all of its purpose.
I suspect this is overstated. I sense a bifurcation is more likely. The masses will TikTockify themselves into short attention span lives. This is already happening and widely predicted.
Those who can retain attention span will find the written word indispensable. So it will continue. The fleeting, ephemeral world described above is proabably already here, but not for everyone.
Interesting. But the Guthenberg parenthesis might be stretched. Before him, written texts did circulate, albeit in lower volumes.
For religious people, particulalry the "religions of the Book", the text is actually indispensable (at least to priests etc).
I am not sire about the full disapearance of reading, albeit Orwell and Huxley also foresaw it.
I am also skeptical about the next step. Goimg bqck to oral forms of knowledge? How oral is a LLM? Also technology has changed the landscape, therefore if no more writing, we are unlikely to go back to a world of shaman, griots and druids. My poi t is we may lose both: humanity (oral cultures, already gone) and intellect.
Or there will be a two-tiered society. A minority (privileged) who still reads, and masses reduced to borborygms (Orwell).
I agree with you reading is great. But the somewhat deconstructionist view that it will be gone soon (and not without good reasons, realistically people read less and less and less and less well) does seem concerning. Brave new world not so sure.
Ultimately cultivating reading and writing should be encouraged. All neuroscientists and commensensical peopke know the benefits of reading, particularly paper books.
Contrarian view maybe, but that's my take at least.
John Waters famously said if you go back to one’s apartment and they have no books don’t fuck them.
The primary concern for me is mass amnesia. Sure, oral traditions edited and modified, but slowly and intently. What the internet creates is episodic and temporary. There is no collective memory being passed down from elders, which is what you could say was the purpose of books originally - other than record keeping.
The real concern will be when amnesia is institutionalized. This will lead us to immature humans “doomed to repeat history because they didn’t learn from it”. And thus a collapse.
Great post though!
Look up the internet historians. He is one of many folks who focus on retelling the history of the internet specifically, and its intersection with reality. You could argue he falls into oral tradition, but videos are unchanging, searchable, and persistent phenomenon hosted by stable corporations in physical databases. People are good at remembering their stories and telling them. What's different now is that our canvas feels infinite. The microcosm you inhabit is worlds away culturally, yet a single google search will transport you there. If anything, you might feel this way because you and I lack a literacy that future generations will possess. I
Thank you for the thought-provoking article!
I feel much in line with Henri Dharma’s comment however: Gutenberg did not invent writing, he invented a way to mass-produce written text. However, some people still write letters by hand, no in spite of the additional effort, but because of it. In the same way, social media is a new way of communicating that comes in addition. However, all this technology is based on thousands of pages of written text; just look at the gigantic technical documentation needed to maintain a social media infrastructure like TikTok!
We may end up with a two-tiered society, but at least the means to educate oneself should remain available, and perhaps the imbalance will swing back ?
yes, and I'd add that LLMs are not oral, they are pretty much text-based. The difference between the pre-Gutenberg era and now is that many things uttered in digital form are preserved (even though governments might not like it, or perhaps rather they want to hoard this data, but keep it to themselves).
The existence of this thoughtful reply is a mode of conversation and a strong implication that the argument is flawed.
It’s not binary. It flows. Books are written to respond to books. It’s just slower than talking.
Socrates was wrong about writing and reading—if he ever really did think it and didn’t change his mind. The rich communication is more complex and beautiful than Plato could capture.
This reminded me of the quote at the beginning of Chernobyl:
“What is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and settle instead for stories?”
Full quote here:
"What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then?
What is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and settle instead for stories?
In these stories, it doesn’t matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is: 'Who is to blame?'"
Very apt.
the ‘Gutenberg parenthesis’ theory is merely the name of a phase in humanity’s ongoing attempt to advance truth. Written text and is dissemination catalyse and enforce this drive.
The articles frenzied ideas that truth doesn’t matter apparently because lots of people don’t seem to care when consuming text is a desperate one.
I am sure I could write a book on this subject ... but who would read it. I sit writing surrounded by books. Taking the arrival of the smart phone as the beginning of the end, the closing of the parentheses, I spent my first 75 years in the culture of text. I taught in schools for many years. The decline in reading was apparent years ago, but became precipitous only in the last 15 years. Where is it going? Pre-literate? Oral culture? Truth and fact as words with meanings fixed generationally? What of the prodigious memory of the digital media, the internet? Questions to which I have no firm answers or even tenuous speculations. Books and reading will not disappear, at least not in any imaginable time span, but what superstition and myth might. accrete around them. Book burning has a long history. No need to pursue this. Think merely of Fahrenheit 451 or A Canticle for Leibowitz. Text will survive as Henri Dharma says. The existence of digital media adds a level of complexity and argues for a separation into a textually literate class, a digitally literal class, and a class that exists in the oral while possessing vestigial literacy. My speculations will soon disappear over the horizon so best to stop before they become risible. One last fact, I feel more and more like an alien in this world that is aborning.
This is interesting but I don’t fully agree. Even though transmedation tends to break hypermedia or make communication appear as though it weren’t mediated, the medium is still the conductor; be it text, video, image—which we can reread, rewatch, and resee, to reinterpret many times—or oral. We can tell a story many times and in different instances either intentionally or unintentionally changing it, and the reason is that language is also media, and as such it impacts fluidity as well. Because we must learn the language others speak to communicate with them, and that breaks or drifts us away from other forms of communication that are mediated by other forms of expression. But this doesn’t mean they disappear, although they might dissipate, because knowledge is cumulative. Meaning that even if the “printed text” parenthesis closes, it is contained within the brackets of language, which is contained within the brace of communication and so on…so it is a part within a bigger part of a part of something else.
Parenthesis is the metaphor you used, so saying it must close is circular logic youve imposed. You could just as easily argue that all phenomenon are parentheses since all phenomenon must end. The human parenthesis will close long before the earth parenthesis will close, which surely must be long before the sun parenthesis finally closes. Are you arguing that this phenomenon of great literary works will close in our lifetime or just that it will cease at all? I feel, if anything, that discerning readers will be in greater demand than ever in the coming decades, for the very reasons you mentioned: consuming slop let's people become twisted up in illogical group think, while good readers will persevere towards cogent and rational understandings of reality, thus giving them a leg up.
As I read this I kept thinking about Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, where they put out the fire by flooding the compartment with oxygen. In the early 90s I can remember writing letter was “a big deal”. Checked by a superior, combed over, corrected, rewritten. Then email arrived and the flood gates open. Just like the oxygen, the flood put the fire out. What also came with this hyper literacy was the crossover from academia into the mainstream, for example gender theory, where complex and nuanced ideas need to be reduced to sound bites woefully incapable of addressing the details.
When social positioning, rather than the details, becomes the point , a TikTok video is going to beat a rigorous thesis every time.
When you enter a world where “you didn’t write what you wrote” becomes the norm, that closed parenthesis feels a step.
Still, this was great. Glad you wrote it instead of doing a short.
But what makes you (or Pettit) so sure that the Gutenberg Parenthesis is ending, or that it is a “Parenthesis” to begin with?
Yes, we live in an age where information can be freely transmitted, absorbed and appreciated in verbal, oral and written form with a speed and efficiency that is historically unprecedented thanks to the internet, but that does not necessarily mean that one cannot isolate specific written portions of text within the contextual framework of their contemporaneous origin point.
Even in the past ten years, the culture of netizens’ behaviour with regards to social issues and what was previously considered common knowledge has transformed immensely.
You can easily find examples of what I’m talking about by using internet archiving services, such as the WayBack Machine, or even by looking through the comments section of popular videos on Youtube from years (or decades ago).
Times change, and people change. But no matter what innovations the internet has since wrought on this earth, there will always be fixed evidence–artefacts of the cultural changes that took place, which record a fixed imprint of these changes for posterity. Let me give you one specific example of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LKCvmivdWE
This video was one that went viral, way back in March 2014. The video depicts a woman in the audience of BBC Panel Discussions show, Question Time, who takes a hardline stance against Gay Marriage (it was only just legalised at the time), which at the time, was a controversial and offensive thing to hear to most people, both offline, and online.
And if you see the comments (Top Comments) in that video, you will see plenty of evidence of this. The vast majority of Top Comments (most of which date from 6-8 years ago) are highly critical of her, accusing her of being a 'bigot', a 'homophobe’ strawmanning her position as extreme, telling her that her beliefs are not reasonable simply because they are traditional, and that her discomfort at Gay Marriage is not enough of a justification for Gay Marriage to not be allowed.
But, as anyone who spends time online and has observed cultural trends from then since will point out, there has been a tremendous cultural shift in the decade since. The vast majority of comments calling out this woman for her uncompromising views would be accused of ‘virtue signalling’, and ‘degenerate’ nowadays.
And to see evidence of this, simply click the 'New Comments’ button, and you will see very different comments arguing a different position. People will agree with her, saying that she is entitled to her opinion, nobody should be bullied into holding different views held by a minority, even one saying that Gay Marriage is a ‘sin against God’.
And this, by the way, is to say nothing about the memes I have seen on Tiktok and Instagram that are highly derogatory towards trans people and homosexuals.
My point from this is, even in this day and age of fluid communication and memetics, you will find fixed, recorded evidence with timestamps that evidences a cultural environment of attitudes and mores that were prevalent at the time they were made. This means, you can use these comments (and other online literature) to gague, for posterity, what opinions and views were widely held at a certain point, and certain idiomatic phrases and memes which were highly context-specific can be tracked across time.
Thank you for writing this. Most interesting.
> They’re the infrastructure and the plumbing.
I agree with the spirit of this conclusion, but suggest it undermines your conclusion. Famously, "modern day sewage systems and clean water have eradicated more disease and saved more lives than all the doctors ever born"
Infrastructure and plumbing are wildly underrated because things that work tend to become invisible (ready-to-hand).
Perhaps the same is true of the literate age. *Still* underrated.
So, a treatise outlining the constructs that presage the movie "Idiocracy?" thanks for the read.
Thoughtful commentary, thanks.
This parallels a lot of Neil Postman's work, particularly The Disappearance of Childhood and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Postman was a student of McLuhan, but was less aphoristic and more rooted in the humanities and the practice of education. I highly recommend looking into his work.
At the midpoint of the Gutenberg Parenthesis we saw “lastness” emerge as a popular literary trope, like the Lay of the Last Minstrel, with respect to oral literature and lifeways. To that end, articles like this one aren’t just analyzing history but are historical indications that a new lastness is nigh—elegy for nearly dead, remediated media.
As a poet, I find relief in the idea that long-broken publishing models may soon come crashing down like so much else we've come to think of as institutionally valuable. A pre-literary sensibility, one that "values the fluid, oral, performative, and communal," sounds like a sensibility we'll desperately need in an exponentially more fluid future. My own writing practice has moved from the book form (no offense to my publisher W. W. Norton) to podcasting, in order to demonstrate a new kind of collaborative, healing poetry-making, with audio as the endgame, not print. The show, There's a Poem in That, may offer a glimpse into what a post-parenthesis poetics might look like.
Interesting read, I appreciate your writing style and insights. To add to this, I think that the faith and trust one has in their information is also critically important to consider throughout history. If the only access you had to information came from the local bard, sharing it via a portal tradition, that is all you had and you have no choice but to remain satisfied with this. Mass literacy and abundance of printed knowledge quickly convinced generations to trust “the written text.” It took effort and skill to write a book, or a script or a scientific article. There was often peer review, or a publisher who read it and deemed it worthy of print. Written word often meant more correctness, consistency and uniformity. Yet, the “Dear Abby” section still existed. It represented, I would suggest, a continued longing for that oral tradition. For that personal 1:1 oral form of wisdom sharing that did not require citations or certifications to verify what they said. Then, around the year 2000 the pendulum quickly moved in a matter of one decade. The internet, smart phones, blogs, social media, made written words cheap and often meaningless. What you read most of the time is opinion, not fact checked, very biased and often inaccurate. The average person also doesn’t have the time or expertise to figure out which part of the written word is even accurate anymore? So, the reaction to this is two fold. Find another medium to get truth. Most people would rather hear an oral explanation on a YouTube video or Reel (much more like the oral tradition). At least the forces a real person to stand behind their words (as opposed to the hidden and masked authors of text). People are using memes and visuals to try and express themselves. The scary part is about what is next. AI is starting to disrupt trust in almost all forms of communication. Soon the population at while will question if every video, photo, quote, or song is even made by a human (let alone if it is accurate). Ironically, this might fully close the parenthesis. As has been stated by others, we might get to the point where we can only trust the humans in our close orbits again. Calling grandparents to hear their personal opinion. Asking a neighbor (instead of the internet) for advice on how to fix something. We may pivot from the written word not because it “served its purpose” but because it has lost all of its purpose.
I suspect this is overstated. I sense a bifurcation is more likely. The masses will TikTockify themselves into short attention span lives. This is already happening and widely predicted.
Those who can retain attention span will find the written word indispensable. So it will continue. The fleeting, ephemeral world described above is proabably already here, but not for everyone.
Shoutout for ‘shitposts by dril’ being included on the list of wonders brought about by peak literacy.