Category: culture

In “The Orality Theory of Everything,” Derek Thompson makes a striking observation about human progress. One of civilization’s great turning points was the shift from orality to literacy. In oral cultures, knowledge traveled through speech, storytelling, and shared memory. Communication was social, flexible, and immediate. Literacy changed everything. Once ideas could be recorded, people could think alone, think slowly, and think deeply. Writing made possible the abstract systems—calculus, physics, modern biology, quantum mechanics—that underpin the technological world. The move from orality to literacy didn’t just change communication. It changed the human mind.

Now the concern is that we may be drifting in the opposite direction.

As social media expands, sustained reading declines. Attention fragments. Communication becomes faster, louder, and more performative. Thompson explored this shift in a conversation with Joe Weisenthal of the Odd Lots podcast, who draws heavily on the work of Walter Ong, the Jesuit scholar who wrote Orality and Literacy. Ong’s insight was simple but profound: when ideas are not recorded and preserved, people think differently. They rely on improvisation, memory shortcuts, and conversational instinct. But when ideas live in texts—books, essays, archives—people develop interiority: the capacity for reflection, precision, and layered analysis.

It would be too simple to say we now live in a post-literate society. We still read. We still write. But the cognitive environment has changed. Our brains increasingly gravitate toward information that is fast, simplified, and emotionally stimulating. The habits required for what Cal Newport calls “deep work” now feel unnatural, even burdensome.

A useful analogy is food. Literacy is like preparing a slow, nutritious meal. It requires time, effort, and attention, but the nourishment is real and lasting. The current media environment offers something else entirely: intellectual candy. Quick hits. Bright packaging. Strong flavor. Minimal substance. We have entered what might be called the Sweet Tooth Age—a culture that prefers pre-digested, entertaining fragments of ideas over sustained, solitary engagement. The concepts may sound serious, but they arrive in baby-food form: softened, sweetened, and stripped of complexity.

After forty years of teaching college writing, I’ve watched this shift unfold in real time. In the past six years especially, many instructors have adjusted their expectations. Reading loads have shrunk. Full books are assigned less often. In an effort to get authentic, non-AI responses, more teachers rely on in-class writing. Some have abandoned homework entirely and grade only what students produce under supervision.

This strategy has practical advantages. It guarantees original work. It keeps students accountable. But it also reflects a quiet surrender to the Sweet Tooth Age. The modern workplace—the environment our students are entering—runs on the same quick-cycle attention economy. Their exposure to slow thinking may be brief and largely confined to the classroom. When they transition to their careers, they may find that on-demand writing is no longer required or relevant. 

Not just education but politics and culture are being swept by this new age of dopamine cravings. The Sweet Tooth Age carries a cost, and the bill will come due.

The content that wins in the attention economy is not the most accurate or thoughtful. It is the most stimulating. It is colorful, simplified, emotionally charged, and designed to produce a quick surge of interest—what the brain experiences as a dopamine reward. But reacting to stimulation is not the same as thinking. Performance is not analysis.

Performance, in fact, is the preferred tool of the demagogue.

When audiences lose the habit of slow reading and critical evaluation, they become vulnerable to what might be called Kayfabe personalities—figures who are larger than life, theatrical, and emotionally compelling, but who operate more like entertainers than honest brokers. The message matters less than the performance. Complexity disappears. Nuance becomes weakness. Certainty, outrage, and spectacle take center stage.

In such an environment, critical thinking doesn’t merely decline. It becomes a competitive disadvantage.

This is why the Sweet Tooth Age is more than an educational concern. It is a political and cultural risk. A public trained to consume stimulation rather than evaluate evidence becomes easy to mobilize and difficult to inform. Emotion outruns judgment. Identity replaces analysis. The center—built on patience, evidence, and compromise—struggles to hold.

When literacy weakens, the consequences do not remain confined to the classroom.

They spread outward—into public discourse, institutional trust, and civic stability. The shift back toward orality is not simply a change in media habits. It is a shift toward immediacy over reflection, reaction over reasoning, spectacle over substance.

And when a culture begins to prefer performance to thought, chaos is not an accident.

It is the logical outcome.