# What is the character of internet technologies?

I think as we grow to take more advantage of this, we’ll see some new
tendencies.

* * *

What is the character of internet technologies? I think the answer is:
extremes of time-binding and legibility (both typical attribues of ‘literate’
rather than ‘oral’ media). Internet technologies approach hyper-literature &
are oral only insomuch as they expose to literature those elements of orality
not previously accessible to it — off the cuff remarks automatically and
losslessly stored (bound to time) without extra effort on the part of a
speaker or ethnographer. As a result, extreme forms of tendencies made
possible by literacy (like ‘living out of time’ by consuming mostly the
results of a time-binding process) can be mixed with situations previously
only accessible to an oral context (unfiltered, uncensored, and uncurated
remarks by people not in positions of power).

I think as we grow to take more advantage of this, we’ll see some new
tendencies.

Tendencies I expect to be very common in hyper-literacy:

  * people being not just ‘out of step’ but exploring in ways orthogonal to trends-over-time (ex., getting into a genre of music based on exposure to one musician and then consuming examples of that genre across a wide swath of time based on random sampling rather than expert curation)
  * expert generalists & niche experts outside academic contexts

I want to distinguish this kind of hyper-literacy (which is really a literacy
that encompasses knowledge of pseudo-orality / secondary-literacy) from[ the
hypermedia literacy I talked about here six months
ago](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/orality-literacy-hyper-literacy-7cf4c779d943).
Hypermedia literacy would exacerbate these trends but also have other knock-on
effects on cognition. Hypermedia isn’t necessary for the trends mentioned
above — the web is enough.

By [John Ohno](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [December 3,
2018](https://medium.com/p/89897f4bede6).

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/what-is-the-character-of-internet-
technologies-89897f4bede6)

Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.