Ew, are we post-literate?

We called it everything is clips now because when you open up your social media and start scrolling you probably notice that

“everything is clips, clips of podcasts, clips of TV shows, clips of movies, clips of sports”

are guests called at the TLDR application of the entire internet. Because it kind of truncates everything we make and it all goes down to it, 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.

To bring you that show once again today.

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You can sign up and get 10% off at better help.com/explained. That's better at hblp.com/explained. So, more video games come from Apple News. Plus, Apple News Plus has everything you're into on the one place. Over 500 top publications covering local and national news, food, sports, plus daily puzzles,

audio, and more news subscribers try free for one month at news.appel/learntermsupply. Today explained from box here with Eric Levits from box 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. A lot of this analysis is really rooted in this 1982 book "Araality and Literacy" by the philosopher Walter Ong.

In that book, Ong argues that there are few defining traits of communication and 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, demonic devices and epithets. The law of the harvest is to reap more than you sow red sky at night, sailors don't work. Fairly great, that's the word.

Ivan Batero. 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' rows and spoke among them. Separately, in an oral society, communication always happens face-to-face or within

an often-with-an-ear-shot and toong this infused discourse with a combat-of-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 morality less accommodating of abstract thought. 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. In 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

in the sense of whatever goes viral is kind of what is going to reach people's consciousness."

"Very demir, very mindful."

“"It's about to be a white boy, something."”

"It's about clocking to that I'm standing on business, isn't it?" People are now communicating through the spoken word, through podcasts like this one. "It's today explained up, Noel King." "Throw YouTube videos, hi, I'm Noel King, and as we celebrate..." People are communicating through speech and facial expressions and even in our textual exchanges

with emojis were now re-approximating the non-verbal aspects of communication.

"Waving emoji, it's Noel King Crown emoji." "Put all this together and some people argue that we have this, uh, we're entering this age of digital or rowdy, we're entering this, 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. We'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, usually Professor Mary Ann 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 culture and Mary Ann 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 is in deeply engaging with a long form piece of writing and it's that kind of reading specifically that is in decline." So that 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, the people of the United States. 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 or Rality versus Literacy kind of thesis. And a lot of people have looked to this concept of Rality 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 red 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 Rality is having on the way our world's being run right now. Critics of digital Rality have attributed it as the driver of the rise of right-wing populism.

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 footer to kill these or while the Odysseus, Trump talks about lying to it. He's lying to it. 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 more broadly, these theorists argue that Rality erodes commitment to these abstract principles of liberal democracy. It could be 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. There's Peter Teele, Antichrist or Armageddon. Curtis Yarvan, the absolute normal form of government is monarchy. J.D. Vance, whatever else you think about them, they read a lot of books, they talk about books.

“I think that a lot of the most prominent authoritarian leftists are Stalinists,”

generally weren't, especially unequainted 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 are still 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. 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 morality, 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 of people to cry 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 heal 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 done. I think there's more reason to be worried about AI than there was about writing in ancient

Greece, but you know, it's something worth keeping in mind. Eric Levitt's wrote about orality for vox.com. When we return on today's plane, we're going to talk about what got us here. Those pesky little videos. Support for today's plane comes from vanta every new tool your team signs up for every vendor that turns on AI features every new integration. Has a chance for something to go wrong,

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Upwork.com. Today explained is back with Adam Clark-Estus senior technology correspondent here at Box Adam.

In the first half of the show we talked about this idea of a reality 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 once 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 Johnny Xiex. Hey y'all, this is Monica Skate.

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, exact and parent of two. For a little like many things 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.”

Not shopping sites. This right here is going to be my go to base. Make up in five minutes with five but then on TikTok, it's an entertainment platform. 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 of 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 because of the way our brains work. 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 little berries sprinkled

in between. Oh 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 talk to for 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 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,

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 user 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 looked at TikTok videos were 40 percent 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 10 minutes of TikTok. Oh 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 to increase 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 is but 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 was 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 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. This 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 world of sci-fi. You know, whatever you like in a story, you can

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.

(Music)

“Peter Bellon on Rosen made this show some time ago. Back then he was edited by Jolie Meyers”

and Amena Al-Sadi. We were fact checked by Denise Guerra, and the show was mixed by Patrick Boyd,

and under the Christians' daughter, haven't said that in a while. These days the team includes

“Abhishei Arthse, Kelly Wessinger, Heidi Milwaukee, Danielle Huitt, Miles Bryan, Adriana Spurru,”

David Tadashore, Miranda Kennedy, Dustin Disoto, Gabriel Donatov, and Noel King. We use music by breakmaster cylinder, and on this one, a little music by Dean Antonio. I'm Sean Romis from today. explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network for more information about that network. Go to podcast.voxmedia.com or Google it. You can listen at free by signing up at vox.com/members.

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