New Oral Tradion?

What is the quality difference between: (a) the wild, full-bodied, live Oral delivery of local folktales by marketplace performers (often with music, song and dance) and (b) their silent Literary print-to-eye delivery from books?

This question has haunted me since the 1970s when as a freelance photographer I travelled through a dozen countries from Zanzibar to Vietnam. One conclusion was that storywriters and storytellers rarely share the same skill-sets, including me, a former part-time storyteller who found it easier to morph into a part-time storywriter.

My question may make more sense if you sample-read any one of my K&D books (FREE on Amazon’s LOOK INSIDE!). I wrote them hoping to recapture a sense of our original Oral Tradition [OT1]. Why? Because I sensed a new one was dawning, but had no idea how soon. . . .

Unique retelling… may well jolt literary sensibilities tuned to the solemnity or quaintness of our best known versions of animal fables. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . San Francisco Chronicle

Stories as closely interfolded as the petals of a rose. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ursula le Guin — 2014 National Book Awards Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

Racy, funny, vigorous, contemporary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Doris Lessing — 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature

By 2019 YouTube said that daily, globally, we watch over 250 million hours of content on TV screens. That works out to 173,611 hours being watched per minute — and also every day 500 hours of NEW content is uploaded.

Note that those 250 million daily TV viewing-hours exclude browser and mobile viewing, as YouTube hasn’t yet got those numbers. Also YouTube has no shortage of competitors.

Thus, like it or not, humanity’s rampant OT2 is swamping our proud yet creaky Literary planet, much as a flash-flood suddenly drowns an old gold mine. What next, eh? How about the accelerating climate impact from the internet’s data storage and transmission?