Digital orality: the return of speech
How texting is changing thought and society
Digital orality began with forums and chats and exploded with smartphones and social media. It spread to all digital interactions, now involving not only speech but also all activities mediated by clicks, taps, or typing—shaping a person’s entire digital behavior.
Just as the medium of orality is oral speech and the medium of literacy is writing, the medium of digital orality is texting. Texting is a typical McLuhan’s reversal: when Gutenberg’s printed text became typing and reached the speed of instant exchange, it reversed into texting.
Like oral speech, texting is interactional, behavioral, and immersive. It doesn’t allow for delay: it’s impulsive and reactive in the moment, without deliberation or strategizing. With sufficient typing speed, thought structuring is as spontaneous as in oral speech.
However, like writing, texting leaves phrases exposed beyond the immediate conversation, turning spontaneous words into high-stakes broadcasting and public record. Additionally, when texting, a person remains physically isolated, with other senses numbed, as in writing.
Isolated writing for a conversation on display results in a monological-dialogical chimera blending egocentrism and status contests. No wonder conversations on social media often split into parallel monologues for an imaginary audience, when users do not really hear each other.
Now, consider the speed of expressing ideas. The average speed of speech is about 150 words per minute. Naturally, we think as we speak, so this approximates the speed of thought. The speed of writing is about 15 wpm. To write our thoughts down, we need to slow them tenfold.
As writing lacks intonation, gestures, and facial cues, it must rely on grammar and word choice to make sense. We can’t help but think about what we write when we write. We think about our thoughts—and speed allows it. The cognitive labor of reflection is embedded in the medium.
The speed of typing is about 50 words per minute. Do we slow down and filter our thoughts as in writing? Yes, maybe. But digital media favor faster interaction. Instead of slowing down thoughts, they nudge us to speed up their expression.
Digital media speed up texting by reducing friction at every cognitive and technical step. Predictive input—autocorrect, word prediction, and next-phrase suggestions—lets users type fragments of thought, while the medium does the heavy lifting. Selection replaces composition.
(Imagine a dystopian future in which you start typing, and the device, which knows you very well, suggests not just a phrase you most likely mean, but a thought you are most likely thinking. Conditioned to select from suggestions, you lamely comply: “Ok, fine, let’s think this.”
It’s only logical that, after reaching its full potential, human prompting of AI will reverse into AI prompting humans.)
Gesture-based and phonetic input—swipe typing and voice dictation, along with emoji and stickers—bypass sequential spelling, crucial to the cognitive habits of the alphabetic mind. Expression becomes gestural and acoustic, closer to speech-behavior than writing.
Emoji, stickers, and pictograms, nudged by the keyboard and digital subculture, compress whole words and ideas into a single tap. Sentences give way to symbols, pushing writing back 5,000 years to Sumerian ideograms, minus the time wasted on carving and drawing signs.
The medium encourages speed and discourages reflection. Even seemingly “literate” affordances like editing serve to speed up responses. When you can change, delete, and resend what you’ve sent, it lowers the cost of mistakes. If errors are cheap, reflection becomes optional.
Before the alphabet, writing systems recorded events. The alphabet made it possible to record speech. This required—and trained—a high level of abstraction: meaningful words were broken into meaningless sounds, encoded into meaningless symbols, and then decoded back into words.
This complex mental process shaped how we think and see the world. Use it or lose it: with the growing role of tapping in typing, the cognitive effect of writing is declining. When media speed up the expression of thought, our capacity for reflective thought weakens.
Gradually, all digital operations, anything we do on the screen, become integrated with texting, and texting evolves to suit not just verbal expression but all kinds of digital interactions. While typing is still based on the alphabet, texting is morphing into typing’n’tapping.
This evolved form of texting facilitates any interaction with the screen—and within the digital environment. Texting is embedded in digital behavior, just as oral speech was embedded in situational behavior in physical reality. That’s why texting is the medium of digital orality.
Texting retrieves speech-behavior of orality, but in digital form. Emojis mimic gestures and facial expressions. Abbreviations like LOL or OMG work as digital exclamations. CAPS LOCK YELLS. Memes and GIFs complement digital speech, as proverbs did in oral culture.
Texting is impulsive, but not evanescent. Isolated, but exposed. Monological, but dialogical. Physically detached, but socially immersive. These features of texting make digital orality a hybrid of orality and literacy, for which we have no sensory, cognitive, or cultural habits.
In addition to typing’n’tapping, new media offer new means of digital behaviour: clicking, posting, scrolling, web-surfing, liking, screenshotting, friending, banning, muting, uploading, tagging, sharing, subscribing, streaming, tweeting, skyping, tiktoking, and more.
Under the pressure of these affordances, cognitive habits nurtured by print literacy for centuries reverse from environmental detachment to environmental immersion. Digital speech-behavior is just as immersive as its oral kind, but within a different, induced environment.
These effects of social media extend to all digital media—to any medium where interaction is mediated by the click and therefore fosters impulsive reactions. Though to a lesser degree, all digital interfaces retrieve the impulsive behavior of orality simply by being interactive.[1]
At last, why is there “orality” in “digital orality”? The term works for four reasons.
1) Digital orality does retrieve features of orality.
2) Digital orality is best understood through immersion, the very quality that distinguishes orality from the detached stance of literacy.
3) “Orality” places digital orality into the “orality vs literacy” paradigm (McLuhan, Havelock, Ong), where it truly belongs.
4) It irritates—“why orality, what is oral in it?”—and that’s good. It creates an antienvironmental effect: the fish of perception is pulled out of water.
How the concept of digital orality emerged
Orality not only survived but reemerged in a new form after electronic media enabled the transmission of spoken language. In the 1970s, Walter Ong coined the term “secondary orality” to contrast it with “primary orality”—the orality of minds and cultures untouched by writing.
According to Ong, secondary orality was brought about by “the electronic transformation of verbal expression.”[2] This new orality was “sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print.”
As an effect of electricity, secondary orality reflected the speech of literate societies—where minds had been trained by literacy for at least several generations. Talking on TV and radio, literate people tried to use the vocabulary and structural completeness of writing.
According to Ong, “Secondary orality is both remarkably like and remarkably unlike primary orality.” The resemblance to primary orality lay “in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas.” [3]
Like primary orality, secondary orality cultivated a strong group sense because listening (or watching TV) united people—they felt they belonged to the tribe called “audience.” Reading and writing did the opposite: they separated people by turning them inward.
However, as Ong suggested, “Secondary orality generates a sense for groups immeasurably larger than those of primary oral culture—McLuhan’s ‘global village’.” [4] The oral tribe was limited by physical reach; the electronic affordance to overcome space-time removed those limits.
Ong’s concept of secondary orality inspired Robert Logan, a physics professor at the University of Toronto and co-author with Marshall McLuhan, to coin the term “tertiary orality” in 2007, which he also referred to as “digital orality.”
Logan used the term before smartphones and social media. He described “tertiary or digital orality” as “the orality of emails, blog posts, listservs, instant messages (IM) and SMS, which are mediated paradoxically by written text transmitted by the Internet.”[5]
At the time, Logan couldn’t observe in detail the hybridization of oral and written speech into digital speech that occurred when texting surpassed calling on phones.[6] His derivation of “tertiary or digital orality” from Ong’s idea was a genuine foresight.
(The digital fusion of oral and written speech was also noticed by some linguists in the late 2000s. I reintroduced the concept of digital orality in Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect and developed in The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution.)
Read the latest on digital orality: The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution.
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] For more on digital orality and the reversal of text into texting, see: Mir, Andrey. (2025). The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution.
[2] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 132.
[3] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 133.
[4] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 133.
[5] Robert Logan first introduced the term “tertiary or digital orality” in the 2007 article “The emergence of artistic expression and secondary perception” and then developed it in: Logan, Robert. (2010). Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan. (Second edition: 2016.)
[6] SMS text messaging surpassed mobile phone calling in 2008; see: “In U.S., SMS text messaging tops mobile phone calling.” Nielsen, September 2008. Texting in messengers surpassed SMS texting in 2012; see: “OTT messaging exceeds SMS for the first time.” Interop Technologies, May 2013.
The bit about predictive text "selecting" rather than composing thoughts is darker than it first appears. Ong noted that oral cultures think in formulas because memory demands it. Proverbs, epithets, stock phrases. Now algorithms are training us into new formulas, but without the communal wisdom that made the old ones sticky.
What troubles me: the original oral formulas emerged from collective experience over generations. Autocomplete emerges from aggregate behavior mined by corporations. Same structure, opposite epistemology. We get the cognitive habits of orality minus its grounding in lived community.
Borges imagined a library containing every possible book. Digital orality is building something similar: every possible response, pre-suggested. The irony is that infinite choice feels more like constriction. When the machine offers you three ways to finish your sentence, all three become less yours.