Tools
Marshall McLuhan saw it coming: as electronic media accelerate, the eye begins to function as an ear. We return to acoustic space, immersive and simultaneous and tribal, even as we stare at screens. The linear, detached rationality of the printed page gives way to something older. Eric Havelock excavated this ancient world, revealing the cognitive universe of pre-literate Greece, where knowledge lived in rhythm, formula, and communal performance. Walter Ong mapped the deep structures of oral thought and showed how profoundly they differ from the literate mind.
We are living through that transformation in reverse.
The evidence is everywhere: the formulaic phrases of political discourse, the repetitive cadences of viral content, the agonistic tenor of online debate, the communal participation of meme culture. Text is becoming speech. The feed has become the fire around which we gather.
Havelock.AI provides instruments to observe this transformation as it unfolds, to detect the presence of orality in text, to measure the return of patterns that predate the written word.