On Saturday, 16 May, we met at Tolhuistuin and on The Inbetween for our first Symposihmm of 2026, The New Orality. A packed afternoon of thinking out loud about what social media is doing to how we read. We left with many hot takes, slime in our hands, and even more questions.
The problem isn’t screens, it’s switching.
Elise Swart opened the day with a beautiful reframe: the screens-are-rotting-our-brains story misses the point. E-readers and offline screens preserve deep reading just fine; what breaks focus is the open tab next to it. Her move was to stop treating social media as the destination and start using it as a jumping-off point. Yes, we might be gaining new skills like flexibility and task-switching – but at what cost?
We’re speaking to the apparatus.
Kevin Munger picked up the thread and walked us through three media regimes (oral, literary, digital-oral) and McLuhan’s “global village” as the nightmare he originally meant it to be. His sharpest line: “We are speaking first to the apparatus, not each other.” In old oral culture, conversation went nowhere in particular; now it goes through ranking, repetition, and A/B-tested persuasion. The echo is the product.
The mid-afternoon detour.
It wasn’t all talks. Gjorgji Despodov’s ritual for clearing the cache, Max’s expedition into the depths of YouTube, and Maria Mombers’ workshop putting you in the shoes of the algorithm: cache cleansed, feed spelunked, slobject in hand. And Jonas Lund’s one-on-one FaceTime wellness session pulled out more personal stuff than anyone expected. Brain rot as guided meditation: very on theme.
Orality was never not literate. It just wasn’t European.
After the break, Reginold A. Royston gave us the day’s most necessary reframe: the “return to orality” narrative often smuggles in the assumption that orality is something we fall back to, conveniently casting the West as the literate adult in the room. He pointed to Adinkra ideographs (17th-century Akan symbols stamped onto cloth) to dismantle the idea that Africa had no writing before European contact. Sound, he reminded us, depends on the memory of the receiver.
Vibes are biopolitical.
In the closing panel, the conversation got denser. Maxime Garcia Diaz talked about making text itself fragmentary to mirror the fragmentary experience of being online, and about anthropomorphising the internet as a way to grasp something that otherwise feels too big to hold. Fırat Yücel reminded us that in the Second World War, people went to cinemas to confront war footage together; today, we confront the same kind of imagery alone, in bed, on a phone. The platforms persuade us that this is communal. It’s not.
Sal Hagen and Daniël de Zeeuw landed the day’s most uncomfortable line: platforms have adapted to engage us pre-cognitively. You have roughly one second to decide whether to keep watching, and most of that decision happens below the level of conscious thought. People share things not because they think they’re true, but because of the reaction they imagine getting. Vibes are a new form of biopolitical control.
Did you miss the talks? Luckily, you’ll be able to catch up via our livestream archive on The Inbetween later this summer. And if you’re still into reading, here are some of the texts that came up during the day:
◯ Peli Grietzer, A Theory of Vibe
◯ Reginold A. Royston, Podcasts and New Orality in the African Mediascape
◯ Fauziyatu Moro & Reginold A. Royston, Deep Listening: Podcast Audiences and Affective Resonance in Urban Ghana
◯ Sal Hagen, Daniël de Zeeuw & Tommaso Venturini, Digital Rhythmanalysis
◯ PISA 2022: Performance of Dutch 15-year-olds has dropped drastically
◯ VICE – Gen Z Is the First Generation Dumber Than Their Parents, Neuroscientist Claims
We have also prepared a concise glossary of terms to help you wrap your head around this pivotal moment. Check it out!
All photos by Zazie Stevens