A major intellectual current in the post-social media age is the rediscovery of media theorists like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Neil Postman, whose works seem incredibly prescient in the age of the Internet and the instantaneous and omnipresent mass communication it enables.
A particular sub-current of this trend is the return to orality, a culture rooted in the spoken rather than written word. Indeed, the vast majority of human history is defined by oral culture, and the world’s brief sojourn to the written tradition may have finally ended thanks to the Internet.
One of the most impressive projects to come out of this domain is Havelock.AI, a tool created by journalist Joe Weisenthal and entirely vibe coded with Claude. The tool analyzes text to give an “orality score” with supporting analysis. For example, qualified assertions are considered literate, whereas categorical statements are considered oral. The tool defines 68 oral/literate markers based on the framework of Walter Ong. It really is an impressive tool that I recommend checking out.
I plugged a few of my old articles into the tool and apparently my writing is very much rooted in the written tradition! (This post also scores as strongly literate.)
