An obscure media theory ⊗ World literacy

The obscure media theory that explains “99% of everything”

The conversation between Derek Thompson and Joe Wiesenthal draws on mid-century media theorists—Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and Joshua Meyrowitz—to argue that the shift from oral to literate culture was among the most consequential transformations in human history, and that digital media is reversing it. Literacy didn’t just change how people communicated; it restructured how they thought, enabling solitude, abstraction, and the institutions built on those capacities. The return of oral conditions—conversational back-and-forth, viral repetition, large memorable characters—helps explain “everything” from the appeal of certain politicians to declining trust in expertise.

Meyrowitz’s 1985 book No Sense of Place gets particular attention. He argued that electronic media would collapse the distinction between public and private behaviour, leading audiences to distrust anyone who code-switched between contexts, and to gravitate toward those who remained consistent across all of them, whatever the content of that consistency. Writing before the internet existed, he also predicted that broader access to information would simultaneously deepen our dependence on experts and erode our faith in them—a description that reads, as Wiesenthal notes, like something written last year.

The conversation closes on AI, which both speakers see as genuinely strange territory: a technology trained on the written word but experienced as conversation, more interior than social media’s agonistic noise, closer in feel to the solitary act of reading than to being online.

I should note that Wiesenthal moves between documented arguments and his own opinions or experiences, without always marking the transitions. Well-grounded ideas and personal speculation end up side by side, presented with similar confidence, kind od softening the solidity of the argument, to me anyway. Still, the theories discussed are worth pondering, even if their chat sometimes feels like opinions more than research.

”Human beings in primary oral cultures do not study. They learn by apprenticeship, hunting with experienced hunters, for example, by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them, but not study in the strict sense.” […]

I remember rereading that section on a plane recently and I jolted up in my seat. I was like, that’s what AI has changed. You can enter into conversations with text. That is true either at a literal level—like I can download a PDF of a book, and give it to Claude and be like, Claude, can we talk about this book? But also, at a higher abstract level, we’re talking about a technology that is pre-trained on text. It’s pre-trained on literacy. But we have an oral, which is to say conversational, relationship with that training corpus. It’s weird. […]

The age of literacy made possible a set of abstract systems of thought—calculus, physics, advanced biology, quantum mechanics—that are the basis of all modern technology. But that’s not all, Ong and his ilk said. Literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture—the decline of reading and the rise of social media—is again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking, living person. […]

We had the age of orality, which was the age of the ear. Then we had the high watermark of literacy, which is the high watermark of the age of the eye. And now we’re in this messy third stage where it’s like there’s some human facial organ that’s an eye and an ear mashed together because we have TV and radio and social media and TikTok. And what’s interesting about these technologies is that they are all oral. What is radio, if not oral? What is television if not oral? What is TikTok if not spoken and live? […]

I think if you look at the modern world, the modern world has elevated a lot of what I think Ong would call heavy characters. I certainly think Trump is a heavy character, with his makeup, and his hair, and his whole visual presentation. I think Elon is a heavy character. I think if you look at the visual way that a lot of sort of YouTube stars look with their ridiculous open-mouthed soy faces when on their YouTube screenshot.

World literacy

Jay Springett’s explains his concept of “world literacy”—the fluency audiences have developed for navigating fictional universes that exceed any single text. People now arrive at a new film, game, or series already carrying a set of expectations: that the story is a window onto something larger, that the world has a history and a governance structure, that changes to established canon require explanation. This intuition wasn’t consciously acquired. It accumulated across five decades of nerd culture—Dungeons & Dragons, the Star Wars Extended Universe, MMOs, trading card games—before leaking into the mainstream. Now it’s just how audiences relate to fiction.

The mechanism Springett identifies is a “leapfrog”: one world raises the standard for how a fictional universe should be maintained, and audiences carry that raised expectation into every other world they inhabit. This means world-builders are no longer competing only against their own previous work; they’re competing against the literacy their audience acquired elsewhere. The practical consequences are significant—if creators don’t manage the “present tense of canon,” the audience will, loudly and messily. Disney’s post-acquisition handling of Star Wars is the cautionary example: an audience that had built genuine competence across decades of transmedia participation, met with governance that treated that competence as an obstacle.

World literacy is the extent to which an audience treats a piece of media as a window onto something larger than itself. That the thing you are reading/watching/playing is a window into an implied world. The world exceeds any single text, or release. […]

D&D wasn’t the first fictional “world”, but it was the first techno-social system to make world-inhabitation mechanical and ongoing. […]

The Star Wars Extended Universe trained a generation of nerds like me in the late 90s early 00s to expect the world to be bigger than the films. […]

Though audiences don’t necessarily treat all windows as equally authoritative. They build hierarchies, show > book > tie-in comic > wiki > reddit opinion. The interesting thing is that they treat the whole ecosystem as part of the world, even while ranking its authority. Implicit hierarchy is another part of world literacy.

§ The two following articles might seem disparate, I haven’t had time to think more about it, but I feel there’s an intriguing overlap. Michelle Higa Fox, writing about generalists and creative careers, argues that the people who will last through AI are those who follow curiosity into territory that doesn’t obviously connect to their work—improv classes, poetry, public speaking—trusting that the oblique path builds something the direct path can’t. Nick Foster, writing about software design, makes a case that the interesting move with AI isn’t to sand down its probabilistic roughness into something deterministic and familiar, but to treat its inconsistency as a material property worth working with rather than around. If you squint a certain way, both are saying that accepting that productive confusion—friction that doesn’t immediately resolve into task completion—is a feature, not a flaw.

§ This is a really bad idea. Kalshi has been rolling out a series of high‑profile media deals that put its prediction data directly into mainstream coverage, including becoming CNN’s official prediction market partner with exclusive odds integrated across TV and digital, and signing an exclusive multi‑year partnership with CNBC to feature Kalshi markets on air, online, and in premium products. It is also deepening its elections footprint by licensing “gold standard” U.S. vote counts and race calls from the Associated Press into Kalshi’s platform ahead of the coming midterms, effectively turning AP results into a live input to Kalshi’s election markets and dashboards. Technically, I guess you could integrate this in some form of “wisdom of the crowd” intelligence balanced alongside analysts and have a more curated/responsible view, but it’s not what I’m expecting to see. It’s going to be exactly what sports betting is in sports coverage, i.e. anything goes monetisation pron.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Reimagining realism: notes on the work of a time between worlds. “We are living in a time between worlds: a place where the harms of old systems that have shaped life for generations are becoming clearer and starker by the day — and the new futures we hope for are still contested and unevenly emerging. We are already navigating a period of instability, precarity and uncertainty.”
• The two decisions that make (or break) a strategic foresight project. “Before you scan trends, build scenarios, or run workshops, there is a moment that quietly determines whether your foresight project becomes decision-useful—or merely interesting. That moment is the Designing / Scoping stage.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• Labor market impacts of AI: a new measure and early evidence. Economic research by Anthropic. “- We introduce a new measure of AI displacement risk, observed exposure, that combines theoretical LLM capability and real-world usage data, weighting automated (rather than augmentative) and work-related uses more heavily. AI is far from reaching its theoretical capability: actual coverage remains a fraction of what's feasible. Occupations with higher observed exposure are projected by the BLS to grow less through 2034. Workers in the most exposed professions are more likely to be older, female, more educated, and higher-paid”
• Anthropic made pitch in drone swarm contest during Pentagon feud. I’m a disappointed but not surprised. “Anthropic PBC submitted a proposal to compete in a Pentagon prize challenge to produce technology for voice-controlled, autonomous drone swarming, according to people familiar with the matter. The company's submission focused on using its Claude AI tool to translate a commander's intent into digital instructions and to coordinate a fleet of drones, with humans having oversight of the system.”
• Can we run experiments on history with AI? “By ‘experimental history’ here, he does not mean speculative fiction or playful alternate timelines. The aim is more austere and methodological. Can we build models that behave in ways that are recognizably constrained by a particular historical moment, and then use those models to ask structured ‘what if’ questions about how literary worlds evolve? The project sits at the edge of both digital humanities and AI research, and it exposes some surprisingly basic problems in how today’s AI models understand time.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• France beats the world record for fusion plasma duration. “France’s WEST tokamak held a hot plasma for 1,337 seconds, a little over 22 minutes. That performance matters because long, steady plasma operation is a core requirement for future nuclear fusion power plants. The run also edged past the mark set weeks earlier by China’s EAST, improving the duration by about 25 percent.”
• Interactive visualization examples. Lovely! “An interactive spatial lens visualization of NYC 311 complaints filed between 2022 and 2025. Drag any lens onto the map to explore how noise, parking violations, heating failures, rodent activity, and illegal dumping are distributed across New York City neighborhoods — and how each category has shifted year by year.”
• An exclusive look inside the largest effort ever mounted to keep the Great Barrier Reef alive. “In response to these existential threats, the government launched a project called the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP). The goal is nothing less than to help the world’s greatest coral reef survive climate change. And with nearly $300 million in funding and hundreds of people involved, RRAP is the largest collective effort on Earth ever mounted to protect a reef.”

Asides

• Apocalypse no: how almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong. “Today, his team believes that the region was home to up to 16 million. That is more than five times the area’s current population. This would mean that more people lived in the classic-era Maya lowlands than on the Italian peninsula during the peak of the Roman empire – all crammed into an area a third of the size.” (Via Kottke.)
• Meet Scotland’s whisky-sniffing robot dog. “Inside Dewar’s cavernous whisky warehouses, man’s best mechanical friend—a Boston Dynamics robot dog with an ethanol sensor for a nose—is on the hunt for leaky barrels.”
• 5,000-year-old bacteria strain found in ice cave resistant to 10 common antibiotics and The U.S. military is reviving microbes from 40,000-year-old ice. wHat cOulD pOssiBly gO wRoNg? (Links and “comment” via nothing here.)