The Internet feels like it has a complex multi-media culture, with textual, audio, video, image and ideographic (a word that means "I know more about emoji than you") components. Memes and animated gifs add a level of dynamism to the basic vocabulary. Icons and UI controls add a whole tactile element. The early document metaphor is falling apart. Infinite scrolling, event streams and a messaging layer began stressing it a few years ago, and AR, VR and IoT are already beginning to undermine it entirely. But there is a powerful "simplicity on the other side of complexity" here as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it. The Internet is starting to feel like an oral culture. But not the literal oral culture of bards memorizing and performing epic poems. Instead it is a culture where orality is a synecdoche for how you experience it.
The Internet has an Oral Culture
The Internet has an Oral Culture
The Internet has an Oral Culture
The Internet feels like it has a complex multi-media culture, with textual, audio, video, image and ideographic (a word that means "I know more about emoji than you") components. Memes and animated gifs add a level of dynamism to the basic vocabulary. Icons and UI controls add a whole tactile element. The early document metaphor is falling apart. Infinite scrolling, event streams and a messaging layer began stressing it a few years ago, and AR, VR and IoT are already beginning to undermine it entirely. But there is a powerful "simplicity on the other side of complexity" here as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it. The Internet is starting to feel like an oral culture. But not the literal oral culture of bards memorizing and performing epic poems. Instead it is a culture where orality is a synecdoche for how you experience it.