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From fireside stories to TikTok - evolution or regression? (69)

Story time

Many things happen behind the scenes for a blog post to happen online. Most of it is boring activities like note taking, writing and researching. Recently however, I had the pleasure to host the writing of a friend.

So my friend really wanted to include a story he was passionate about. But we faced a problem when, during the review phase, he couldn't find any sources that backed the story up. Yet, he clearly remembered hearing the story. We ended up removing that part from the blog. But this interaction also got me to reflect on how memory works and how technology influences our memory and our culture. 

From spoken stories to written records

What happened to my friend is pretty normal. Humans have lived in oral cultures for most of our history. In such cultures, stories are co-created rather than fixed. Each telling is unique; something is always added or lost, depending on the moment. Great epics, like Homer’s poems or the Norse sagas, reached us only after many adaptations. Sometimes changes we meant to please patrons, other times to connect with local audiences or even to suit the style of the poet. My friend likely heard a version of the story, but his own interpretation shifted the details just enough to preserve its spirit while making it untraceable online.

This experience is a clear clash with the literal culture of modernity. Literal culture is much more hierarchical - a story is no longer a shared creation but instead separates people to transmitters (writers) and receivers (listeners). More importantly, it's a permanent and precise way to store information. This makes it inflexible to small changes.

Naturally, the two approaches have their pros and cons. An oral culture can foster more equal societies because it is much harder to hoard knowledge. It also increases our collective imagination and intelligence: we all get part to shape a story and are responsible for its retelling and engagement. It ultimately leads to tighter societies. Conversely, a literal culture helps us share knowledge across cultural and geographical boundaries and store much more information - to an extent impossible by oral culture. There is an interesting effect on memory too - ancient Greek philosophers found that writing decreased our discipline and memory - but it increases our capacity to remember collectively, since we can now preserve virtually everything. Both approaches have their merits.

Welcome to the visual era!

By this point, you might be wondering how TikTok come into the picture? Actually, TikTok might be the sign that we are now abandoning literary culture too ... and instead embrace a visual culture. Goodbye Gutenberg, hello memes!

In a visual culture, the dominant mode of information sharing is not exchanging stories or written text but instead photos or videos. Tik-Tok, with its short form content, exemplifies this trend perfectly. Such a culture enables the sharing of ideas and information at an instantaneous rate to pretty much everyone alive. In a sense, its the most universal of all cultures, completely transcending all barriers. We can all appreciate a cat video or understand the brutality of war. A visual culture is also extremely efficient: everything shared is very rich with information and offers a tremendous amount of choice. This new paradigm is all about everything, everywhere all at once.

As with anything good in life, visual culture doesn't come without a cost. Particularly, visual culture makes us even more passive. With literal culture, while the contents of the page are already predefined, our senses still have all the freedom in the world to interpret and imagine what is being written. A visual format instead does all the heavy lifting for us. It might be the equivalent of eating concentrated paste through a tube.

Not just passive consumers

Of course, all modes of sharing knowledge have their unique benefits and drawbacks. Individually, we can all make our own decisions on how to best access information. However, the collective impact is often overlooked in such discussions. Perhaps we should consider the implications of having a society of mostly passive citizens and bring back, to some extent, the amazing powers of oral traditions. So go ahead, tell a story your way and maybe forget half of it - it will be your own for sure!


 

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