Every Saturday afternoon I have to sit through The Boss rattling his papers — several of them — sighing at some opinion he disagrees with, grunting at another he approves of, only bringing me into it once he’s already decided what I should think. And even then, he answers for me before I can talk. But he’s a disappearing species.
As you and I know, the cultural tides are shifting back to where they always belonged: the spoken word. Podcasts, voice notes, reels and short video clips have turned the modern world into one giant, comforting campfire.
Society is returning to the oral tradition, where the conversation is simple enough for an old Chesapeake Bay retriever to understand. No squinting, no papercuts, no long, impenetrable arguments you have to hold in your head like a stick you’re not allowed to put down.
Just a voice drifting out of a speaker while I get on with something useful, like nudging New Boy off my sleeping mat for the fourth time today.
Naturally, The Boss is taking all of this badly. He once believed universal literacy was the end state of civilisation. He now suspects it might have been a 200-year blip.
“It’s a retreat, General,” he muttered, dropping the magazine section on to my toes.
“People are abandoning the discipline of careful thinking. Reading isn’t merely a pastime; it’s intellectual weightlifting. When you read, you wrestle with the text. You interrogate the argument, turn it over in your mind, and follow a thread for more than three seconds. Take that away, and people lose the machinery for judgment altogether.”
I offered a sympathetic thump of my tail, mostly to see if he was heading towards the kitchen, but he was only warming up.
His hero of media theorists, Marshall McLuhan, predicted way back in 1962 in The Gutenberg Galaxy that electronic media would eventually supplant the written word and create a “global acoustic space”.
“It’s come full circle,” The Boss laments. “Socrates was terrified when writing first became widespread in ancient Greece, convinced it would ruin human memory. And here we are.”
Socrates could supposedly recall around three thousand proverbs. I can recall four recent smells, one buried bone, and the exact date New Boy arrived, so I don’t feel that different from Socrates.
“Meanwhile,” The Boss went on, “this generation can’t remember mum’s phone number because the phone does it for them. They’ve outsourced memory entirely. Why memorise a maxim when you can screenshot a meme and shower your friends with pithy wisdom?”
He had a point, I suppose, though my own philosophy has always been simpler: if a thought cannot survive a quick sprint after the neighbour’s cat, it probably wasn’t worth keeping in the first place.
The Boss grimaced, adjusting his spectacles. “We’re losing the art of deep focus. Everything’s an echo. A soundbite. A voice note.”
“Quite,” I would have said, if I thought he needed my affirmation.
Instead, I simply yawned, rested my chin back on my paws, and let the radio dissolve into a low, comforting murmur of human chatter.
Let The Boss weep over the death of literacy. The Voice came first, the Page was an awkward interruption … and now it’s back to the Voice. Granted, it’s not much of a cosy campfire when everyone is staring into a rectangle by themselves, but nobody asked me. Woof!
