Digital orality: Relational bias and requests for affirmation
The emancipation of authorship gave everyone access not just to information but also to self-expression. This affordance has turned into not only an obligation for everyone to expose some online activity, but also an obligation for others to react. An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.
According to Ong, orality is “word-attentive in a person-interactive context rather than object-attentive.”[1] To put it simply, orality is relation-oriented, while literacy is object-oriented. For someone with the mindset of primary orality, it is impossible to say, “Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.” Plato is dear to me—and that’s it!
Collective involvement serves to maintain tribal loyalty. One needs to stick to their own folks regardless of whether they are right or not. Actually, the very notion of objective truth was not invented yet in primary orality: objective truth was a by-product of literacy.
The relational bias of orality had direct ethical implications. It put tribal loyalty into forms of selective, personally biased justice. In an oral community, Lady Justice would have neither blindfold nor scales. However, the relational bias of orality cannot be judged from the standpoint of morality. Collective involvement—sticking together—was an evolutionary mechanism of survival.
Survival required not only collective unity but also hierarchy within the group. People's benefits and responsibilities depended on their personal qualities. Physical strength, skills, other traits, and—more and more—heritage, determined individual status and shaped social hierarchy. From a survival standpoint, hierarchy served to make the best use of individual qualities within the collective.
To meet the changing demands of survivability, social hierarchy had to be adaptive. In early human groups, wealth or official rank did not yet define status. Only speech could offset the advantage of physical strength. Some anthropological theories even suggest that one of speech’s earliest functions in primordial human groups was to allow beta males to form alliances, conspire against the alpha male, and kill him. This, in turn, led to a new group structure based on alliances among breeding males, with a corresponding distribution of responsibilities, benefits, and access to procreation. [2] As the regulator of relations, speech also became the regulator of status within the hierarchy.
To maintain hierarchy and its adaptability, the oral lifestyle required constant status checking. Every oral speech act, through its phatic load and emotional intensity, carried a hierarchical message: to confirm or advance the speaker’s status and to affirm or challenge the statuses of others. This did not always manifest as open challenges or flattery, but status competition was always implicitly embedded in oral speech-behavior. This psychodynamic persists in any collective that relies on orality for social regulation.
The relational bias and status competition were opposing forces that created a dynamic balance of mutual loyalty and constant challenge within an oral community. In a sense, this balance fostered harmony in tribal relations by protecting the group from external threats while maintaining an effective internal hierarchy. This kind of harmony, however, often involved a peculiar mix of patronizing (or matronizing) and bullying. The weakest were both protected and bullied, while the strongest were revered and challenged.
Speech-behaviour was the primary venue for displaying this psychodynamic in all its shades. Each speech act carried the imprint of both relational bias and status competition. The Hegelian struggle for recognition, said to drive society, unfolded in these acts—each simultaneously serving as a request for affirmation. When we speak, we still position ourselves within the social structure, expecting others to confirm our status. We also hope that relational bias can override the subject matter—especially when the subject mater is not favorable to us—and sway the judgment of others in our favor.
Relational bias, however, became irrelevant in writing, as writing is object-oriented. It deals with the meanings of things, not with relations between people. Status competition still persists in literate society but takes the form of content competition. This is why literacy tends to disregard personal relations and focus on the subject matter.
Social media have not only retrieved relational bias and status competition but have also enabled the individual’s request for affirmation on an unprecedented scale. This is perhaps one of the most important features of digital orality—and one of its most powerful retrievals from primary orality. Billions of users—anyone who goes digital—display their existence for others to react to and affirm. Everyone’s demand for “empathic involvement” (McLuhan) creates an incredibly intense environment of engagement, which is essential to the engagement-driven business of social media platforms.
The very design of digital platforms revolves around these primeval and archetypal motives of social participation, aimed at collective communion and status competition. Some people try harder, crafting a presumably more acceptable digital version of themselves. Others may not even realize that their digital acts are subconscious requests for recognition—requests that social media also convert into demands for time and engagement.
Digital orality, however, has introduced some innovations. Now, not only other individuals but also algorithms—while collecting our personal data—serve as judges to whom the request for affirmation is submitted. Digital media offer a service that enables self-actualization—the highest value in Maslow’s pyramid—through the responses of others. The growing role of algorithms in this process renders self-actualization deprived of the “self”—of agency. We are now “self-actualized” without even knowing it, simply by pausing to watch something that catches our eye while scrolling the newsfeed. Yet this pause is reflected in how our newsfeed is shaped, influencing the environmental signals that affect our actualization.
The new affordance for billions to submit their requests for affirmation is reshaping the political, cultural, and ethical foundations of society. For example, a new premise has emerged: that someone “needs to be heard” (or “seen”). As it grew into an existential request, the need “to be heard” turned into a political demand. In a literate society, it is impossible to insist that someone “needs to be read.” Not because literacy favors arrogance (though it does), but because such an affordance simply does not exist. For a demand that someone “needs to be read” to arise, the person must first write something and, second, write something worthy. Literacy, by default, due to its technical affordances, is selective and elitist. It selects those who can write something and whose writing can cross the threshold of publishing. Neither of these limitations exists in digital orality. Electronic, and later digital, media created a new imperative of representation: the representation of “voices”—identities, not ideas.
The emancipation of authorship gave everyone access not just to information but also to self-expression. This affordance has turned into not only an obligation for everyone to expose some online activity, but also an obligation for others to react. The opportunity for oneself has turned into a demand for anybody else. The typically oral request for affirmation has been tremendously amplified, turning into energy vampirism on a planetary scale and contributing to online agitation and polarization.
Prior to social media, physical distance separated people, deterring both friendship and enmity. The internet removed time and space between individuals, extending each person to the scale of all humankind and allowing everyone to reach everyone else. Dunbar’s number, which represents our brain’s capacity to maintain relationships with about 150 individuals, has been overridden—Facebook now suggests a limit of 5000.
With so many strangers—whom we can’t help but invite into the intimacy of our solitude—digital media have become not only a platform for our explosion into the world but also a space for the world’s implosion into each of us. As McLuhan puts it,
But whereas formerly the great clashes took place occasionally between groups geographically separated, there are no longer any geographic separations in the electric age. In terms of our daily knowledge and information about each other the human family now shares a very small global village. Our technology has enabled us to put all of our senses outside ourselves, with the result that we find our neighbor is inside, and not “out there” any longer. When the senses go outside, not only Big Brother but little brother goes inside.[3]
McLuhan reminds us that “People leave small towns to avoid involvement. The big city lined them with its uniformity and impersonal milieu” [4] (italics his). Big cities emerged with writing. Digital orality returns us to the village—now the global village—testing our tolerance for otherness by bringing others much closer, and even more intrusively than oral communication did: right into our most intimate space—our screens.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
[1] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]), Orality and Literacy, p. 66.
[2] See, for example: Hunter, Donna. (2022, March 24). “Male-male alliances and the evolution of societal patriarchy.” Stanford School of Humanities & Science.
[3] McLuhan, Marshall. (1962). “8 mm in context: the modern media and externalized senses”, p. 21.
[4] McLuhan, Marshall. (1997 [1967]). “The Hot and Cool Interview” to Gerald Stearn, p. 58.
Thanks, as ever. Thought provoking. Is it truly a global village now or simply en electronic class silo on a feedback loop ? One that if one lives within its feedback loops seems to pour oil on troubled political waters but on the ground, is doing no such thing. For instance, back in early 2001, I landed in San Francisco for my PhD research year (folk harpers on the West coast) from Queen’s University, Belfast. I attended the American annual anthropological conference in that first week. One of the papers delivered was by a Chicago based academic who talked in quite florid terms about the ongoing terrible violence in a certain part of Belfast. Well, I had just spent the past five years driving through it to go to University and could not understand what he was on about. Maybe it was an entirely alternative Belfast ? His research funding was dependent upon such bigging it up though. More recently, during Brexit, it became obvious that the British state was acting upon similarly deeply faulted academic information in regard to Northern Ireland’s cultural and political realities. I suppose that the silver lining is that such profit and career boosting Chinese Whispers rather than grounded Intelligence are becoming more immediate in their socially destructive effects. Eg MAGA in LA as I write.