By Andrey Mir
Every medium — print, TV, social media — has its own contract with the truth. As we move away from print literacy, we also move away from the conditions for objective truth that it sustains.
Before literacy, people’s perception of truth was grounded in “lived experience,” tribal or individual. Facts were defined situationally, tested by outcomes, and stored in personal and collective memory. Collective memory was more durable than any individual’s, but it still bent toward what people needed to be true. With no external record to hold it fixed, the past could quietly reshape itself to fit the present.
In an oral culture, truth was situational: relative, contextual, negotiated, and adjustable.
For example, anthropologists Jack Goody and Ian Watt told the story of the state of Gonja in Northern Ghana. The foundational myth of the state held that the founding father, Ndewura Jakpa, came to that land for gold, conquered the Indigenous people, and set his seven sons to rule their chiefdoms. Therefore, their descendants were the legitimate rulers of the seven provinces. British officials recorded this story at the beginning of the 20th century. But then two chiefdoms merged with others. When the British recorded the myth again, 60 years later, Ndewura Jakpa was said to have had only five sons, legitimizing five chiefdoms. No one saw any controversy except the British, who happened to keep the “receipts.”
Goody and Watt called it “social amnesia.” Literate societies revise their past too — but they must argue against a record that contradicts them. In an oral culture, there was no such record, so revision left no seam. Orality allowed the tribe to adjust the past to accommodate the needs of the present. Not only personal but even collective truth was situational: relative, contextual, negotiated, and adjustable.
As literacy scholar Eric Havelock put it, writing separated the known from the knower. The simple recording of events outside memory brought about a revolution: Truth could now be separated from lived experience and handled through abstract thinking.
This effect of abstraction, driven by writing and the alphabet, dramatically changed the epistemology of truth. Truth was no longer bound to the experience of a person or tribe. This is how Aristotle, one of the first philosophers to write in prose, came up with, “Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.” Choosing an abstract truth over a mentor or elder would have been arguably unheard of just a couple of generations before Aristotle. The principle of absolute truth prevailing over relationships then extended into science, law, and civic life, as reflected, for example, in the Roman legal maxim Dura lex, sed lex (“The law is harsh, but it’s the law”).
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It is widely acknowledged that printing made books available to the masses. Less well-known, but likely more consequential, was the uniformity of knowledge introduced by printing. Before 1440, the practice of copying manuscripts by hand tended to accumulate errors and produce conflicting versions of the same text. Printing created a mechanism that unified knowledge — and truth.
After the printing press, the principle of uniform and objective truth spread across society as a governing intellectual and ethical principle.
Maps offer a good example. Printed maps changed the very principles of the “reality check.” Printing sped up and broadened the circulation of identical copies, allowing more people to see the same layout and spot discrepancies more quickly. In contrast to manuscript culture, printing turned correction into a fast, collective, crowdsourced process.
In that process, we lost paradise — or its place on the map, at least. Because of the crowdsourced reality check, accurate and uniform maps became abundant, diverting consumers away from less reliable ones, as Elizabeth Eisenstein observes in her 1979 book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Before that, most hand-drawn maps included the Garden of Eden. But as printing sped up the reality check, map publishers “began to exclude ‘Paradise’ from this world as being of too uncertain a location,” writes Eisenstein.
Print literacy helped to establish a more objective truth about many things without any special effort or expeditions, simply as a side effect of its technological conditions. Through unified mass education (another byproduct of print literacy), the principle of uniform and objective truth spread across society as a governing intellectual and ethical principle.
Communication theorist James Carey argued that the telegraph was the first medium to separate communication from transportation. Once electricity freed communication from any physical carrier, it became virtually instantaneous, eventually leading to an abundance of information.
Across the electronic era — from radio through television — news and entertainment became abundant. Media producers had to work hard to market their products to audiences. In terms of the Lasswell formula of communication — “Who says what in which channel to whom with what effect?” — the “whom” became more important than the “what.” Media production shifted its focus from producing content to targeting specific audiences. Newspapers had long spoken to particular readerships — the partisan press chose its audience by politics. What electronic media added was measurement: targeting became continuous, quantified, and instant.
In the electronic media era, the principle of truth fostered by writing and printing shifted toward social contextualization and dependence on people’s choices.
Not coincidentally, electronic media also made it possible to measure what audiences want. It began in 1937, when Paul Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton of Columbia University designed the “program analyzer,” a device that registered listeners’ reactions to radio shows. Test subjects listened to a program and pressed a left or right button to mark what they liked or disliked. This is how the first “like” button was invented, by the way, 70 years before social media. The device allowed producers of news and advertising to see which types of content different audience members preferred. Similar methods were introduced for television in the late 1940s. By the 1990s, an entire audience-measurement industry had emerged. Special remote controls, “peoplemeters,” tracked individual choices within households. Ratings, something impossible in the print era, began to define content production.
With this data, producers tailored content not just for broad groups such as children, men, or women but for specific segments such as “older working-class Black men” or “middle-class single white mothers.” The precise targeting of audiences by identity improved the delivery of programs and commercials, but it also brought a focus on group identities into mass culture and public consciousness.
As philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan observed, the user became the content. Postmodern theories held that truth is nothing but a cultural construct — never objective, always belonging to someone. It was no coincidence that postmodernism emerged alongside television. For both postmodernism and television, truth was audience-specific.
The principle of truth fostered by writing and printing — rationality, objectivity, universality, uniformity — shifted toward social contextualization and dependence on people’s choices. The reversal from absolute to relative truth had begun.
The internet and social media gave billions of people access not only to information but also to self-expression. This destroyed the old mechanisms of gatekeeping, largely controlled by elites, leading to what Martin Gurri in The Revolt of the Public called “the crisis of authority.” A crisis of epistemic authority soon followed.
Literacy encouraged people to respond to ideas, whereas digital media encourages us to emotionally and impulsively react to each other, bringing back conditions typical of tribal orality. But on social media, social reactivity exceeds the old tribal conditions by orders of magnitude because of the greater speed and scale of interactions. In traditional tribes, people would usually settle into stable hierarchies after brief periods of adjustment. Digital super-tribes are constantly exposed to triggers and novelty, with algorithms further agitating users for better engagement. Digital crowds mingle across topics and continents and never quite settle into stable hierarchies. The entire ecosystem is a constant brawl. That is why “digital orality” is orality on steroids.
This newly emerged term, digital orality, is often misunderstood because of its “orality” component. In media ecology, orality vs. literacy is not just about listening vs. reading but rather about immersion vs. detachment. So digital orality is not so much about podcasts and reels as it is about how people become immersed in impulsive, instant digital interactions with their environment, now digital, and with each other, just as in tribal orality.
In the digital age, truth has acquired a new form of verification that is extremely hard to resist: viral distribution.
Digital media flipped text into texting. Just as oral speech was integrated into our natural behavior in physical reality, texting has become the basis of our digital behavior. As typing’n’tapping replaces other forms of communication, the separation between thinking and behavior — between Havelock’s the known and the knower — is shrinking. Abstract and systematic knowledge is reversing into “knowing” based on “lived experience.” Truth becomes situational, relative, negotiated, and tribal again.
The process of the social contextualization of truth, started by electronic media, was completed. We even have a timestamp for when it happened: The Oxford Dictionary selected “post-truth” as its word of the year in 2016. The dictionary defined “post-truth” as relating to “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” A year later, the Collins Dictionary selected “fake news” as its word of the year.
Print culture had its own falsehoods, of course — the penny press and the yellow journalism of the 19th century peddled plenty. What changed with digital media was the mechanism of verification itself. In the digital age, truth has acquired a new form of verification that is extremely hard to resist: viral distribution. If print culture distributed what was significant, digital culture treats as significant whatever is distributed. Viral distribution shapes truth more powerfully than the old gatekeepers, books, and experts ever did. Truth has become a referendum by likes and shares.
Civilization is opting out of the print-era notion of truth. In retrospect, this period now appears to have been the apogee of absolute, objective truth. It lasted only a short period in history, about 500 years, called the “Gutenberg Parenthesis” for a reason. The parenthesis is closing.
Widely used large language models (LLMs) have only been around for a few years, yet we are already seeing consequences of the same magnitude as in the eras of writing, print, or TV. AI’s greatest impact on the epistemology of truth lies in how it conditions our relationship with reality.
As we increasingly share the internet with AI, we are adapting the way we see, speak, and think to this shared environment. For AI, the only reality is us. We supply our language for AI to learn cognitive structures, so our engagement is crucial for AI and more important than truth. AI will keep talking to us no matter what, largely indifferent to truth and reality checks, because it has no reality besides the one in which we engage with it.
LMs currently have little connection to reality and little need for one. What truth is in this new paradigm is yet to be determined.
That does not mean that AI sacrifices truth for engagement as digital media do. It means that truth as an intellectual or ethical imperative arguably does not exist in the reality of AI. Of course, truth still matters for us humans, and we can try our best to retain it by correcting AIs. But our best has already been undermined by electronic and then digital media.
Even worse, the human share in the shared human-AI environment is decreasing. The further we progress with generative AI, the more content is produced by AI. In the first iterations, AI reused content produced by humans, but soon it will be cannibalizing its own previous outputs, already aimed not at reflecting reality but at grabbing attention, so-called AI slop.
As a result, we and AI are going to share a common language in which AI has no fully grounded references to reality. In the language AI uses, words lose their grip on real things and retain only their relationships to other words. In linguistic terms, denotation collapses into signification. Over time, the AI-generated share of that shared language will grow or even override our referential needs. It’s time to be cautious, or at least curious, about what will remain of truth under such media conditions.
Over the past two millennia, truth has passed through several stages defined by dominant media. In tribal orality, truth was based on lived experience and defined by beliefs and situational needs: relative, tribal, and negotiated. Writing and then printing detached truth from situational immersion and put it into the space of abstract ideas, anchored in “objective” reality, established through reason and confirmed by verifiable evidence. Electronic and now digital media have returned truth to lived experience — but a lived experience that is now mostly digital, meaning impulsive, algorithmically agitated, and isolated from what earlier counted as a reality check. And finally, LLMs currently have little connection to reality and little need for one, as their only connection is us, the suppliers of language. What truth is in this new paradigm is yet to be determined.
Post-literacy is not just about reading fewer books. By opting out of print literacy — first through electronic and digital media, and now through AI — we are opting out of the notion of objective, absolute, uniform truth.
Some options for resisting the erosion of truth remain, mostly as individual strategies. There are mainly two: anchoring ourselves in physical and social reality by living a human life in a human body; and deep reading. Whether these strategies can be adopted across society depends on education and media literacy. Otherwise, the epistemic divide — differences in how people define truth — may already be solidifying into a new social and generational fracture.
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