on oral psychodynamics
as the online meta-medium evolves, it confers new responsibility to its architects
Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man-- the technological simulation of consciousness…
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)
Indeed, the oral culture becomes a kind of reflecting mirror of the observer's soul, delineating the viewer exactly and leaving the viewed object obscured .
—David Godfrey, in introduction to Harold Innis’s Empire and Communications
when something disappoints you, it is not because it is bad so much as because it could have been good. for example: by lazily titling the 1995-2015 cohort—the cohort which would be raised in an entirely online era— “generation Z”, and by making inevitable the internet colloquial title of “zoomer” to the entire generation, our society formulated a self-fulfilling prophecy. electric media, championed by the zoomer cohort which had been gradually trained in its use, began to do as McLuhan had foretold, dissolving the boundaries of place and reverting man to an oral culture after a few short centuries of visual culture— culminating in an oration engine called Zoom which took the place of the nation’s classroom’s. Zoom, and the Zoomers, began to accelerate the transition from visual to oral culture, doing more to replace visual media in a few years than had been done in nearly the entire period since the study of media became a serious topic. and this frenetic zoomerism met its zenith in the onset of a media-centric philosophy, a singularitarian offshoot known as Accelerationism1…
the disappointment being, of course, that the dates and definitions are just slightly too wrong for the joke to truly Land.
a post by Zeynep Tufekci describes the new-media commodity known as Clubhouse, an apparent synthesis between social media undercurrents. livestreaming, paid-subscriber monetization, and a focus on smaller-group dynamics have each had their moments in the last couple of years, but Clubhouse promises to make it all cohere. as far as promises go, this one has rendered a valuation at over a billion dollars US— for a product that isn’t even openly available yet.
on Clubhouse, a traditional call2 is modified to be an asymmetrical social interaction— the host has the exclusive ability to grant audience to a user after the user has ‘raised their hand’ in a request to speak, like a technically-formalized lecture. the structure is intended to be informal, mostly-candid, like listening in to an interesting conversation at a party3. Clubhouse seeks to provide the minimum degree of engineering and structure to keep the social dynamic functional.
SPEAKERS TO A DEAD ROOM
Socrates wrote nothing down. Neither did Jesus. You see the problem with text is that it assumes it's own reality. It cannot answer, and it cannot explain.
From The Dancer Upstairs
Clubhouse fits within McLuhan’s4 flexible idea of a “cool” medium, detached and participatory, involving multiple senses. its close relationship to the oral-participatory Twitter by Tufekci is a brilliant link— and one that was not lost on the new-media Goliath, which is testing its knockoff Spaces in parallel with the rise of Clubhouse itself. but Tufekci, and everybody else so far, has missed what i consider to be the real revelation latent in this development.
since the US tends to promote monopolic hegemony in tech spaces, Clubhouse and Spaces have entered the Silicon Valley branch of Thunderdome— two men enter, one man leaves. whichever prevails, though, the ultimate goal is the same as that of Twitter itself. each app intends to facilitate what the tech industry tends to refer to as conversation.
the word conversation itself connotes a pleasant, gentlemanly exchange, but what they mean by the word conversation is exactly what Tufekci spotted in it— a simulacrum of orality. jack’s wicked engine makes countless concessions on this front. maintaining an eternal archive, and keeping every post visible on the colossal ‘feed of everything’, for two. a lot of the discourse which has in the past existed around ‘safe spaces’ indeed gnaws indirectly at this limitation of first-generation social media. it is not that exposure to the outgroup is actually particularly stressful, it is that man crafts many masks for himself, and social media allows you to wear only the outermost. orality includes an aspect of playing to the audience, of taking live feedback and molding one’s message to play off of the private assumptions of the group. Twitter does indeed include this element— but the only audience is everybody, and the most effective orators in such an environment are inevitably the demagogues, the rilers of the mob.
contrary to Keller’s naive whining, Twitter’s greatest fault is a surfeit of connection. connection in places that should not be connected, linking and searchability where one would prefer privacy and isolation. it is completely natural for one to wish to speak in a manner not conducive to public discourse, and anybody who says otherwise does not wish to speak with you— but to speak past you.
the least discussed, but perhaps most disproportionately influential, social medium on the Web is also one of the oldest: 4chan, an imageboard entirely structured around anonymity and ephemerality. the appeal of the imageboard is reduced by most observers to the taboo factor: things can be said there which no reasonable person would say elsewhere. but this is only the extreme case. the erasure of identity allows for two effects that the web is otherwise incapable of: unrecorded speech, and private discussion5. if you were to chart out the psychodynamic texture of 4chan, it would be a hallway lined with windowed doors. as the user strolls through the hall, he peers into each window, seeing a brief glimpse of the orgiastic congress within, and if it interests him, he may walk inside and participate. in theory, anybody could broadcast the contents of that room elsewhere, but in practice to do so would be vulgar and meaningless. the conversation obeys the boundaries of the room, neither spilling to the wider ‘net nor admitting outsiders who may judge the proceedings harshly6. the feeling of a self-contained space where comments are addressed exclusively to the other participants in the conversation is an incredibly rare element of public forums, and at the very least that element Clubhouse seeks to replicate.
THE EXTENSIONS OF MAN
"Formerly it required time to influence public opinion in favour of war. We have now reached the position in which opinion is systematically aroused and kept near boiling point. Strong vested interests in disagreement overwhelm concern for agreement.”
Harold Innis, Changing Concepts of Time (1948)
if literacy is to be conceptualized by its impact on human cognition, it is as an extension of memory. Tufekci rightly notes that to aid memory with a printed book is not to abandon the practice of memory, but to liberate it. likewise, if the internet is to be conceptualized by what it augments— aside from those effects which are interconnected derivatives of prior media— it is communication itself.
on the one hand, that Clubhouse gives the host the curative control over a given conversation is a welcome alteration of the Twitter formula, and a commitment to real ephemerality encourages its users to speak to each other instead of speaking for the archive. but this is not to say that the outside does not encroach upon these open rooms:
Timothy Kaldas’s thread about the use of Clubhouse in Egypt leaves the psychology out in the open: users already act as if they are to be informed on, regardless of the presence of any particularly suspicious participants. the open nature of rooms without the insulative protection of anonymity inevitably forces the user to keep in mind the outside audience. and if there can be no private interaction, either by forcible privacy or by anonymity, self-censorship and talking to the crowd will restrict the platform’s orality to that of public speech. this is below the ambition of Clubhouse, and indeed they should set their sights higher, but both anonymity and room-gating would introduce costs which the platform is unlikely to be eager to take on.
Balaji Srinivasan holds his pulse to Twitter in referring to it as a warzone— and gives Clubhouse another relation, to Substack. concretely, the two are only related to one another in that they are new start-up media which seem to attack a perceived weakness of the giants before them. abstractly, they are united by their creator-consumer asymmetry. Srinivasan’s optimism for a more civil platform may be misplaced. the nature of orality is to be antagonistic, oral media is the media of Beowulf and of Achilles; attack and riposte are in its nature. Substack is the reactionary medium in that it clings to visual communication against the rising tide, but it is not untarnished by orality either: its comment section will prioritize the aphoristic and conflictual, and the internet which provides its substrate is too participatory to suppress oral conflict. what Clubhouse and Substack do is provide a monopoly of force to the hosts, which intends to tilt the conflicts such that real antagonism will choose to snipe at the host from elsewhere. this may provide some benefit through sheer fragmentation, perhaps some of the gravity of Twitter and Facebook is that many of their detractors have nowhere else to go— as recent history has shown, it is the political right that has real use for safe spaces.
EMPIRE AND COMMUNICATIONS
So is there some turf wars going on here between the literate classes that hold power in pretty much every society in the world and the rest of humanity? Yes, no, of course.
—Zeynep Tufekci
The age of cathedrals had passed. The age of the printing press had begun.
W.E.H. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Nationalism in Europe
orality had already gained ground over literacy by the end of the twentieth century. the cultural rise of hip-hop and Black culture represented that culture’s superior grasp of the oral psychodynamic which electric media had invisibly imprinted onto the American landscape. far from an outlier, Twitter’s promotion of orality fits into a slow sea change which began with the invention of the telegraph.
the overly-literal transcripting of the speech of Donald Trump was so grating because it represented a visual attack mounted on orality from above. Trump’s messaging was not primarily but exclusively oral— improvisational rather than pre-written, impulsive rather than premeditated. the 45th president’s use of Twitter as a platform was discussed in thousands of ways, but as an augmentation of his voice it was never characterized. the loose approach to language that Trump exhibited was an explicit mimicry of speech; it connected him to his rural ‘base’ because they had never been engaged with in the oral mode, except by the pastor and themselves. history will view the 2016 election in largely the same manner as the anecdote of the televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy, where candidates were separated by nothing except their suitability for new media.
the alignment of Trump with oral communication and the Democrats with written communication is closer to the underlying reality than most conceptualizations of the 2015-2020 period. many apparent anomalies— Trump’s unusually high performance with minority groups relative to his rhetoric toward them, for example— are more understandable with his mode of communication taken into account. fact-checking which nitpicked technicalities, and hollow ‘dunking’ that sought to catch him as he misspoke, never resonated with the people who were attuned to oral communication. via repetition and aphorism, Trump built an image of America which was in fact communicated very clearly and consistently, despite the types of contradiction that are crippling in the hierarchical mode of print media.
American business culture in part developed its own parallel orality in the postwar years, a series of corruptions of written language which in fact were regarded as abominable in the mode’s early years7, so the final strongholds of print culture in America are interlinked: academia and the media. politicians, almost entirely ivy-educated and steeped in visual culture, tend to operate in a visually-oriented linguistics that their constituents barely recognize, and the visual behemoth will aggressively defend itself against any incursion of oral culture. the apparatus which seeks to ‘correct’ the oral language of the populists is but a loose mesh of Fussellian class signifiers. 8
the union of institutions of print is exactly analogous to Yarvin’s Cathedral: elite in a highly specific way, outmoded in a highly specific timeline. with the concept of Cathedral the reactionary Yarvin attempts to articulate the American right’s attitude on the media and universities, here coalesced into a single entity. in Yarvin’s milieu the Cathedral is united by loosely-held beliefs— perhaps held by a majority on-campus, but the beliefs that he seeks to unite them with follow not an iron rule but a trend line. the underlying cause of the elite messaging, and indeed the elite thought processes of the media and academy, is their vestigial over-reliance on visual media over the human voice. print provides the sinews of the academy, where dialogue cannot be advanced in any format but the journal. the slow iteration of print journals, and indeed the entire academic infrastructure of journals, maintains a print media hegemony that could not have otherwise survived into the 21st century. today the people hunger to be taught by orators— the podcasting industry is testament enough— and the academy yet speaks in a stilted facsimile of the written word, instead doing most of its teaching through assigned reading, maintaining its entire dialogue over print in a technological environment that has long since obsolesced that mode. the journals, indeed, are the institution most vulnerable to the universal leakage of piracy, with the Russian pirate empires of sci-hub and library genesis providing a unique danger to them. if this infrastructure were sloughed in the process of media evolution, the academy would be forced to replace it with a collaborative and iterative medium which obeys the fundamental structure of orality. the field of philosophy would be revolutionized, for it has screamed to escape the bonds of print since Socrates himself!
the american media industry has its own print infrastructure, the institution of the newspapers. while in many ways the newspaper has been hollowed by the fundamental mobility of electric media, so far this haircut has been limited to centralizing print rather than replacing it. as institutions like Reuters and the Associated Press proceed to informatize their process, a gradual shift towards orality will progress, but print holds to a series of traditions and conventions which slow the medium’s adaptation. on Twitter, one will often see young activists chastising the press for their use of the passive voice, which they charge with obscuring the action of the story. this can only be understood as a conflict between visuality and orality; the political particulars are too fragile to be considered as a cause. Scott Galloway expects that the New York Times will outlast Google and Facebook— but if this is to be the case, it can only be the consequence of a destructive impulse from America’s government.
SPECTACULAR TIME
The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomised images where even the deceivers are deceived.
—Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967)
The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented.
—Lewis Mumford, Authoritarian and Democratic Technics (1964)
if class and power coincide broadly with dependence on print media, it follows that orality itself is a threat to the very structure of the regime. social media is viewed often as partisan, but each side of the political divide seems to believe it partisan towards the other! this is a consequence of the erroneous belief that it is the attitude of the workers or the founders that determine how these technologies impact the political arena.
in fact the natural inclination of a new medium is toward pure disruption. crystallized structures of influence which had over time become friendlier to one party or the other are being obliterated indiscriminately by a media environment which cannot presently be turned to political ends. even if a new-media giant seeks to tilt the scale, even that act becomes a unilateral destruction. the phenomenon of deplatforming leads eventually to a further fragmentation of online social geography, and once shattered, the medium will show not even the possibility of being under a regime’s influence. what presently appears as a bias in new media can only be a difference in the level of adaptation of each party; any attempt to return new media to “balance” would only further damage the old order.
whatever our goals for the structure of our society, prudence in the design of our media should not be sublimated to the ends of any arm of the prior order— in the long run, the impact of such measures will be nil, and taking such measures is likely to retard the movement of new media towards its end point. instead, it is necessary for us to view the effects of new media as they pertain to the new order that they will eventually bring into existence— on that count, the hacktivists and techno-libertarians have achieved a progressiveness unmatched by any appendage of our political institutions.
“The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”
—Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)
there will, eventually, be an acceleration poast.
one might hesitate to mention ‘traditional’— i do find the decision to avoid the use of video to be an interesting one, and it plays to emphasize the oral-culture argument. it also, incidentally, decreases the barrier to entry for new creators.
the internet this decade has grown a dichotomy between creator and consumer which is now being fully explored— whereas it would have been more or less unthinkable to expect a YouTube uploader to treat their comment section like its own small forum community, the upstarts have either engineered a more intimate interaction between influencer and fan (as TikTok has) or have handed the reins over to the creator laissez-faire (as has Substack). the old social media giants seemed to envision a massive community, a circle of friends that expanded to encompass what would previously have been acquaintances or even strangers. but friend groups, at least the type that we want, seem not to operate at scale. a cult, however, is a general structure that is quite suited for an at-scale implementation. Clubhouse’s implementation lies creator-side.
the absence of any mention of Marshall McLuhan in Tufecki’s post is curious, considering its praise of Ong, whose writing was from the start intertwined with the theory of McLuhan. on the other hand, McLuhan has a rather poor reputation in the academy— those poor writers with an interest in being accepted by the institutions of modern thought would do well to avoid the name. i have no such aspirations; i will accordingly be referencing his work.
both counts may seem unintuitive. indeed, while 4chan’s board only holds a limited archive and forces threads to erode away after a certain number of posts, there are third-party archive sites that permanentize the entire website. however, anonymity is really the aspect of 4chan that keeps this in check. there is no reputation on 4chan, your remarks in one moment will not be held against you (or in your favor) in the next, so the searchability of your post is essentially meaningless unless you committed certain highly specific crimes. also, discussion is only ‘private’ in the sense that it is somewhat direct: you can be assured that the user you’re speaking with is active in the thread’s timescale, and threads take on the aspect of spaces where a conversation can occur, rather than published records as on a forum-style website (that “necromancy” of inactive threads was against etiquette on early web forums did provide some assurance here)
a consensus on 4chan is that the surge in popularity that the site enjoyed after the 2016 presidential election did irreparable damage to some of the raunchier parts of the imageboard. this is probably mythology rather than any objective observation, but even before then, the outsider was always reviled: the formatting of posts, use of site features, and the tone of speech on the site obeys a strict convention, and breach in that convention has always led to the offender being branded with a pejorative— none of which are fit for reprint, but all of which connoted being ‘new’ or from another, more uncool website.
since corporate English is generally viewed with a sort of begrudging respect these days (outside the most firmly entrenched positions of the academy), it may be awkward to think of it as being quite poor by the standards of written English. David Foster Wallace’s short story, Good Old Neon, lampoons the style in a way that depersonalizes it nicely.
Visual culture is ubiquitous among Fussell’s upper class and the upper-middle, then tapers off from there down.