31/08/2026
”Digital media do not simply replace literacy with orality. They selectively reactivate features long associated with oral communication—immediacy, dialogue, performance, responsiveness, and the presence of voice and image—but reconstitute them within technological conditions fundamentally different from those of primary orality. A podcast may be conversational and intimate yet remains recorded, edited, distributed, and reproducible; a livestream creates immediacy and audience interaction yet can be archived, replayed, clipped, and recirculated; a social-media post is written but may function rhetorically like speech—rapid, dialogic, responsive, and seemingly ephemeral—even as it remains searchable, copyable, and algorithmically retrievable.
What returns, therefore, is not primary orality but something closer to technologically mediated orality: oral forms of interaction reconstituted within infrastructures of writing, recording, storage, and computation. The storyteller becomes a streamer; the audience becomes a networked public; memory becomes both archive and database; performance becomes recorded and quantifiable; conversation becomes searchable and reproducible. What was once ephemeral can now persist indefinitely, while what appears immediate may already be technologically mediated and archived.
The post-literate environment therefore does not take us backward into an oral society. Rather, it reconfigures orality, literacy, and visuality within a shared technological infrastructure, where modalities increasingly overlap and become convertible: text becomes voice, voice becomes text, speech becomes transcript, image becomes caption, conversation becomes data, data becomes generated language. These conversions, however, are never neutral. Each changes what is preserved and what is lost, what becomes visible and what becomes retrievable. Speech converted into text gains durability and searchability but may lose gesture, tone, timing, and other dimensions of embodied presence. The contemporary subject consequently moves among modalities without necessarily experiencing them as discrete media.”
The post-literate society is not a society without writing. On the contrary, it may be a society of too much writing. What is changing is not necessarily the disappearance of the text but its place within the communicative order. Literacy may be losing its privileged cultural position without becoming obsolete.
As artificial intelligence increasingly participates in the production, transformation and circulation of language, the more consequential question may be what happens to our capacity for sustained attention, interpretation and intellectual agency.
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