'Survival of the Twittest'

In 1982, Walter Ong brought us the term "secondary orality". This refers mainly to television, radio and telephone communication. Since it is a post-literate orality, it doesn't serve as a sole medium of collective consciousness and memory. Instead it depends for its existence and functioning on writing and print. Ong also examined the pre-literate cultures and how the organization of the mind and consciousness change with the beginning of writing. Memory before writing had a totally different role. Knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost: fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential for wisdom and effective administration. Without writing, words as such have no visual presence. They are events. Language is a mode of action and not simply a countersign of thought. For Marshal McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1969), writing is a visual enclosure of non-visual spaces and senses. It is, therefore, an abstraction of the visual from the ordinary sense interplay. And whereas speech is an outering (utterance) of all of our senses at once, writing abstracts from speech. With print the eye speeded up and the voice quieted down. But inner verbalizing was taken for granted as inseparable from the horizontal following of the words on the page. Today we know that the divorce of reading and verbalizing can be made by vertical reading. So vertical reading, and constant repeatability to avoid the risk of loss, rings the proverbial bell in the present too. The strategy of generating short, intense and repeated content to luckily create the next meme has a lot to do with a society of immediacy, audience and performance. Social media is not orality. Quite the contrary is mostly based on text. But is nothing like the writing before the tv and telephone.. Is this perhaps a second literacy?