The Tyrrany of Literacy. On oral tradition and what is lost
35 comments
·October 12, 2025jgalt212
I dullard authors never mention the telephone game, but at least two comments mention this.
cdfsdsadsa
I had similar thoughts while thinking about the right to own copies of music or films.
That is - increasing ease of recording and transmission of cultural artifacts has homogenised that output, and reduced the urge and ability of individuals to preserve and pass on that output.
TheAceOfHearts
I'm not sure that's true, at least for music we've seen an explosion of covers and style remixes. Depending on the popularity and virality of a song, you can often find between dozens to hundreds of different covers of varying quality. And there are artists dedicated to converting popular songs into various other genres.
crispyambulance
It is ironic that the essay comes from UPenn in Philadelphia.
Many of you may find it shocking or unbelievable, but literacy is slipping in many parts of the US (like Philadelphia). The number of functionally illiterate people is increasing, schools are failing to educate students for a constellation of reasons.
The reality is that we instead suffer from a "tyranny" of illiteracy. I think those folks in their ivory towers, like upenn, should help to address that before starting the pearl-clutching about what has been lost because of widespread literacy.
rayiner
Do you have data for philly? i can’t find anything that shows a decline before covid.
carlosjobim
Question: What do we call knowledge transfer which came before even oral tradition? I'm talking about things like "hold your axe this way", watching and learning stuff. These traditions are even more easily lost than oral tradition, I'd suppose.
viraptor
Imitative learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imitative_learning
AlDante2
What is lost seems to be the ability to spell…
boxed
In English, that ability was never gained in the first place ;)
n2j3
Literacy didn’t just spread knowledge, it narrowed what we recognize as knowledge.
jessmartin
This! It’s both-and. Literacy has been undeniably good, but we rarely consider the consequences of widespread literacy.
There’s a way of knowing something that can be recalled orally from memory that is different and valuable. But we even measure it using a yardstick for written knowledge (accuracy, breadth, etc).
I believe this overemphasis on written knowledge (really, it’s implicitly a denial that any other type exists) is part of what drives the hysteria about LLMs ending the world. LLM doomerism has to believe that written knowledge is at least the most important if not the only necessary form of knowledge.
diego_moita
And that is a double win, right?
Superstitions should never be considered "knowledge", the same way that stupidity is not intelligence and noise is not information.
maxZZzzz
I don't know. Having all scientific knowledge written down and being indexed for research seams to scale better. Also I am not sure what point the article is trying to make. It seams a bit vague.
I feel with the sentiment for the "loss of skill" due to convenience tech.
But hey, these days many people have the choice (meaning the time and money), to keep some of the skills alive. The internet gives you the possibility to find any person teaching the skill set you seek. For more common stuff even Youtube is a trove often for free.
bn-l
So pretentious. This kind of thing gives humanities a bad name.
suddenlybananas
It's interesting how people will think that the Klamath preserved an oral story from 7700 years ago, yet in the historiography of Europe, a 50-100 year gap from the events to the recording of them in text is viewed with deep suspicion. For example, viewing the accounts of the Trojan war as being even remotely accurate beyond "there was a war in the bronze age," is seen as pretty fringe.
DoktorL
But there was a war, wasn't there? So why not admit that 8000-year-old myth can have got "the rocks went flying" part right.
Written accounts are still vastly superior to oral tradition of course, their accuracy is on another level. But that doesn't mean there is absolutely nothing to glimpse from old myths.
perihelions
> "So why not admit that 8000-year-old myth can have got "the rocks went flying" part right."
Because they're cherry-picked examples fished out of a sea of nonsense. You can't ignore that the body of oral tradition is almost entirely florid fiction, and claim that a few bits and pieces that vaguely resemble reality are evidence that oral tradition preserves information over long timescales. It's methodologically invalid. That kind of analysis gives the same result ("we found an ancient myth that resembles a fact"), independent of whether the proposition, "oral tradition preserves information", is true or false.
It's a classic fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking ("Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position while ignoring a significant portion of related and similar cases or data that may contradict that position.")
weregiraffe
Nobody has oral history from 7700 years ago.
grebc
Lol seen the homepage of the ABC? (Australian not American broadcaster).
harvey9
That's a really interesting site. Thanks for the tip.
carlosjobim
Of course they can, why not? The example in the article is really good and perfectly believable.
People at that time would wander around a lot in their everyday life, and it would be very easy to remember these small stories which are connected to the landscape. A father would tell his son when they were walking past this feature of the landscape, and the son would later tell his son and so on.
Why? Because they didn't have cell phones to scroll on while wandering, or a radio to listen to. And they weren't thinking about their mortgage or about primaries. When you live in a world like this, it is very easy to remember a bunch of unusual stories, and when they're connected to the landscape instead of to people, it is almost a guarantee that they will be passed on for generations.
suddenlybananas
I agree, but the linked article claims otherwise.
The oral tradition is not lost, it just evolved to suit the times; urban legends and creepy pasta just have a lot more relevance. Literacy created the written tradition, moved writing past being just a medium for storage and transmission and moved the word beyond the limitations of speech. What really killed the oral tradition (in the sense TFA means) is technology, the ability to reproduce without error and the idea of "correctness," the old myths ceased to evolve so new ones took their place.