There is a sense in which _all_ cultures, past, present, future are primarily oral cultures. Print, hypertext, manuscripts exist only at the will of the oral culture.
Why do we read books? Primarily to talk about them with other people. I would estimate that a little over half of what I learned in grad school came from conversation with other grad students around a table in either the Michigan Union or Metzger's tavern. And I suspect that a good deal of what each of us has read at one time or another has been in response to concerns first raised in conversation.
The internet _may_ even reduce the importance of the oral culture slightly by partly replacing conversation. My snarls at ______ were primarily to his blocking conversation by focusing on the motives or character of the participants in it rather than on the ideas expressed. Were he to develop his ideas in a formal written text, an editor would intervene between him and me, forcing both of us to focus on subject matter rather than on persons. E-mail can substitute for conversation but not for books and essays. An essay on a web site is not really different from an essay in a scholarly journal: that is, in that case the medium is _merely_ the medium and does not effect the message.
Carrol