The digital revolution is changing our behaviour fast, sometimes in surprising ways. Apparently thanks to the rise of email and texting, we are making fewer phone calls than we did in 2007. Those of us who still watch terrestrial television are tweeting our friends about it at the same time. And the number of worldwide Internet users has just reached two billion – that’s one third of the world’s population. In this era of texts and tweets, blogs and clips, how can we explain the recent explosion in live literature events?

I’ve been Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival for nearly a year, and during that time I’ve become aware of the astonishing growth in book festivals: when Edinburgh launched in 1983 there were just three others in the UK, now there are about 400. Put next to the explosion of other live events, it seems the revolution in cyberspace is precipitating an equal and opposite reaction in the real world.

It may sound a little perverse, but as light relief from the welter of urgent contemporary prose that has dominated my life for the past few months, I’ve been pondering the live literature explosion while reading a book by an old favourite, Marshall McLuhan.

Published in 1962, The Gutenberg Galaxy suggests that the way we think shifts dramatically whenever we undergo revolutions in the technology of mass communication. It’s a striking book to read from this perspective, half a century later, as the long-awaited trickle from printed books to e-books is now turning into an avalanche, and the extent of the electronic revolution becomes starker by the day.

In the face of the Internet’s data explosion, books by authors we respect have come to feel like a kind of ‘gold standard’ for information.

McLuhan’s ideas are of particular interest now that I’m working for the world’s biggest literary festival; he convincingly argues that this electronic revolution heralds a shift from typographic systems of expression that are predominantly visual, to electronic ones which are principally oral.

For McLuhan, the typographic revolution brought about by Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press created new systems of human interdependence and communication. It made possible new forms of communication, including the novel, as well as closed human systems such as the nation-state. Both the novel and the nation-state, in his view, would become outmoded in the new electronic era, thanks to a technology that ‘has the power of totally involving all people in all other people.’ One wonders what he would have made of Facebook.

McLuhan’s idea of a structural shift from the visual to the oral is powerfully argued, and he persuades me that just as much as Shakespeare was engaging in the shift from an oral culture to a visual one, today we may be locked into the reverse process.

The shift from the visual back to the oral as a means of structuring human systems is certainly not happening overnight. For every YouTube clip there are a hundred emails, blogs and internet pages and, although the novel and the nation-state appear increasingly to be challenged by other ideas, the written word – probably the most powerful tool ever invented by humans – is as potent as ever.

This provides two possible factors to help explain the rise in popularity of the live literary event. First of all, in the face of the Internet’s data explosion, books by authors we respect have come to feel like a kind of ‘gold standard’ for information.

In the old days, a BBC dispatch by Kate Adie from Bosnia or by Michael Buerk from Ethiopia had a crashing authority. By contrast, today’s 24-hour rolling news and internet coverage has created a kind of information inflation. When you can read conflicting views on the war in Afghanistan from Al Jazeera, the BBC and CNN, the value of each news source is reduced. Books, with their lengthy production times and relatively high purchase price, have managed to retain some of their authority.

The second factor, which is connected to the phenomenon of information inflation, is that we are increasingly able to access information directly from its source. With football players’ transfer movements the subject of endless media speculation, a tweet by the footballer himself carries huge weight. Increasingly we have the impression that we’re gaining direct access to people. It is only a small additional step that takes us to the notion that a face-to-face meeting with that person is a realistic prospect.

What better way to broker a meeting between people with ideas, and those who want to hear them, than through a literary festival? For the author, it represents an opportunity to look readers in the eye and find out whether those carefully-crafted words have moved them. Indeed, the rise of the live literary event is only possible because it works for readers and writers.

There’s one final thing which explains the book festival’s popularity today, and that is the old-fashioned power of the congregation. Before Gutenberg and the invention of the highly distributable octavo format, illiterate people gathered round great orators – town criers, church leaders – to gain an understanding of the world.

Five hundred years on, in an era when centralised structures for government and information appear to have ever-decreasing power, the congregations are increasingly gathering once again. Only this time they’re readers, and they’re gathering round authors.

The Edinburgh International Book Festival runs from Aug 14 to 30, Charlotte Square Gardens, Edinburgh, with 750 events featuring authors, politicians, journalists, poets, photographers and commentators from 50 countries. www.edbookfest.co.uk