Oral Tradition in the Age of TikTok: Rethinking Performance, Audience, and the Griot in Nigerian Digital Culture

TikTok has emerged as one of Nigeria’s most dominant digital cultural platforms, having significantly expanded its Nigerian user base in recent years to become a primary engine of cultural production among urban youth. However, the relationship between this platform and Nigeria’s rich oral literary heritage remains largely unexamined in literary scholarship. This paper investigates what the encounter between TikTok’s platform architecture and Nigerian oral storytelling traditions, including Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa oral forms, may mean for the future of those traditions. Drawing on Walter Ong’s theory of secondary orality, Isidore Okpewho’s oral performance scholarship, Richard Bauman’s performance-centred approach to verbal art, and platform studies scholarship on algorithmic aesthetic constraint, the paper proposes the concept of compressed orality to describe the specific aesthetic formation that may emerge when Nigerian oral storytelling meets TikTok’s platform architecture. Compressed orality tends to preserve the performative surfaces of oral tradition whilst foreclosing its structural and epistemological depths. The paper identifies three structural foreclosures: the abolition of live co-presence, temporal compression, and the algorithmic reassignment of cultural authority and argues that understanding these foreclosures is essential for Nigerian oral literature scholarship, literary education, and cultural policy.