Unlocked | NM Reads: Neo-Orality 1 (Jacqueline Fendt)

“Neo-orality” has been an important term in the New Models zone this year—but what exactly do we mean by it? With this two-part episode of NM Reads, we bring you two papers by the scholar Jacqueline Fendt, who is Emeritus Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at ESCP Business School in Paris, and—to the best of our knowledge—the first to define “neo-oral” in the way that we’ve come to use it.* She also, as a Swiss corporate executive in her 70s, happens to have a lot to say about “vibes” and what she observes to be a titanic shift in human communication from democracy to, as she puts it, “vibrocacy.” For Part 1 (this post), Lil Internet reads excerpts from: Jacqueline Fendt, “Democracy, Neo-Orality, and the Unraveling of Political Norms: What Can We Social and Political Scholars Do?” Open Journal of Political Science, Vol. 15, No. 3, (May 31, 2025) [Copyright: CC BY 4.0] For Part 2 (forthcoming), Lil Internet reads excerpts from: Jacqueline Fendt, “Beyond Wicked: Vibocratic Problems in the Post-Truth Era” International Journal of Social Science Studies, Vo. 13, No. 2, (Redfame, Jun 27, 2025) These papers have been vital to our thinking this fall. In the spirit of the neo-oral we’re sharing them with you here as Lil Internet produced audio with the hope that they will be as big of an unlock for you as they have been for us. _ * Media theorist Walter J. Ong wrote about a “second orality” in 1971, and then more extensively in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World, describing it as “a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print.” Fendt cites Ong’s writing but goes much further, showing how the rise of “neo-orality” is fundamentally re-ordering human society: “By Neo-orality, we mean not just a return to oral habits,” Fendt writes, “but a deeper epistemic shift. It privileges immediacy over reflection, presence over argument, and shared emotional resonance over detached verification. Unlike classic orality, which relied on embodied presence, neo-orality travels across screens, memes, and livestreams.”