How journalism is shifting from print logic to conversational media

Can we find our niche in a more oral culture? ... Can we acknowledge the change happening around us and start seriously discussing how we can redirect our energies to adapt to it?”

Chad Davis is the chief innovation officer at Nebraska Public Media

Toward the end of last year, I started working through a self-generated reading list of media theory books. It was early in that quest that I stumbled upon Jeff Jarvis’ “The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet.”

Here’s the gist of this particular work: Almost 575 years ago, the world (first Europe and eventually its colonies) changed with the advent of movable type printing, which gave knowledge permanence and, in so doing, made it replicable, verifiable and critiqueable. It fundamentally changed how humans ingested and processed information about our world, as private study led to private thoughts, which led to a clearer delineation (and eventual elevation) of the self. The squishy circularity and community-orientation of oral culture gave way, over decades, as the dominant form of information communication, to the crisp, individualistic linearity of printed type, and in so doing eventually (I’m glossing over a lot here) created the knowledge economy we know today.

The theory of the push/pull between orality and literacy* isn’t new. Media scholars have been focusing on the seismic impact of the printing press for 65+ years now. Jarvis’ thesis, written circa 2022, is that, in human history, our knowledge economy is the exception, even if it feels to us like the rule. As we are nearing the closure of the historical parenthetical and that economy is starting to come to an end, what lies on the other side, he reasons, is very likely to be more similar to what came before societies crossed into the parenthesis: “The future is medieval.” (* “Literacy” here doesn’t mean the ability to read, just that society is dominated by the influence of the written word.)

Look around at the media landscape, and we can feel the truth in that. The internet, especially social media, opened the door for orality to begin eroding the potency of literacy. Now we watch the rise of the creator economy and the documented shift of audience trust away from institutions and toward individuals. Vibes — a source’s feeling of authenticity — increasingly matter today as much as (sometimes more than) facts and the verifiability of the information being sourced. Once you factor in the conversational nature of chatbots and chatbot-based web search, it’s not hard to see how these tools orient toward natural language conversation and hasten the societal tilt toward orality.

Of course, there was a time (pre-1450 C.E.) when the written word was widely distrusted by the majority because one couldn’t assess the source. But throughout our lifetimes, there have been layers of institutions with transparent values and standards that make disembodied information trustworthy. That is, in part, the audience's trust in public media, which we work so hard to maintain.

What does this shift toward orality mean for public media?

To start addressing that, we must first acknowledge that, at the birth of public media in the U.S., radio and television were the state of the media art at a time of near-peak literacy (again, defined against orality, not by the ability to read). Today, the state of the media art is math — algorithms and feeds, reasoning models and chatbots. Excelling at linear video and audio is not the media that our democracy needs us to infuse with our values. There are many avenues to explore to figure out how to position public media for relevance in 2050. But it does seem like we should start by at least agreeing that it cannot happen while we pursue a media model from 1950.

Next, we have to acknowledge that public media’s power as an institution is magnified by a world of scarcity, where information sources are limited, mostly to a corporate media ecosystem firmly rooted in a capitalist ideology. Today, the cost of creating media has dropped to the point that anyone can express their voice, and it’s more important for that independent voice to game the algorithm (or pitch to someone who can) than impress a gatekeeper.

Knowledge is a commodity, not an asset, and orality only encourages that commodification. As Jarvis writes, “Everyone can be connected. One-to-many is replaced by any-to-any and any-to-many. The mass is dead …. For half a millennium, the mediators of media — editors, publishers, producers — controlled the public conversation. Now we may break free of their gatekeeping, agendas, and scarcities — while at the same time risking the loss of the value these institutions have brought in recommending quality, certifying fact, and supporting creativity. What must we create to replace these functions?”

Public media has always strived to give voice to (i.e., “platformed”) lesser-heard voices (usually individuals) in the media landscape. What role do we play in a landscape where audiences don’t need us to amplify the points of view of creators, when community-think trumps individual voices? To what are we an alternative when those literate corporate media business models have given way to algorithmic distribution and AI-mediated knowledge that favors orality?

The pendulum is now swinging back away from peak literacy culture and reorienting toward a more balanced relationship with orality, but the two will always be in tension. Even today, when we encounter a good writer, we often talk about them having a distinct “voice.”

In that mixing of orality and literacy, I am optimistic that public media can still play a role, just as a small number of institutions influenced media in the era before the printing press. Can we find our niche in a more oral culture? The first time we took aim at that target, it was the social media era. We landed wide of the mark, pulled off by our unwillingness to step away from the safe, authoritative gravity of broadcasting. We are getting another chance now that we are firmly ensconced in the AI era. Can we acknowledge the change happening around us and start seriously discussing how we can redirect our energies to adapt to it?

Chad Davis is the chief innovation officer at Nebraska Public Media, where is he the founder of the Public Media Futures Lab and co-founder of the Public Media Innovators Peer Learning Community. Prior to that he was the inaugural head of Nebraska Public Media Labs, and led teams responsible for published experiments with AI, video games, virtual reality, 360-video and podcasting. He speaks regularly about the intersection of public media and emerging media and publishes a semi-regular newsletter under the Public Media Innovators banner.