Our past -- or our future

From commenting on each other's "totem-like" walls to "friending" casual acquaintances, researchers see a resurgence to ancient patterns of oral communication, according to The New York Times.

Blog posts, home-cooked videos, commenting, and micro-blogging are reportedly more like old ways of talking, than actual writing.

"Orality is participatory, communal and focused on the present. The Web is all of these things," Irwin Chen, a design professor at Parsons, told the Times.

One academic calls this extension of orality to the web secondary orality, observing it comes with consequences: it could very well end up replacing our real oral culture.