Unexpected Benefits of Phonetic Alphabet Keep Appearing

I have written a number of times on this blog and elsewhere that the phonetic alphabet was the greatest ever breakthrough in information technology. Here is a great blog post, Why Text Remains King of the Web, by Steve Rubel that documents some more reasons.

Steve writes: “I am starting to believe that despite all the hype around online video, text remains King of the Web. Why text? There are at least five reasons...

It's scannable - according to Jakob Nielsen users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average site visit and 20% is more likely

Three letters: SEO - For all that Google Universal Search has done to elevate video, search results are still largely made up of text and everyone wants better SEO

The workplace - It's much easier for cube-based workers to read text on the screen and get away with it vs. watching long videos. Watching videos (even work related vids) screams "slacker"

Mobile Devices - Yes, of course you can put a video on an iPhone. But it's work and requires planning. Text is easier to pull up in a nanosecond

Distribution - Nothing flies like text. It's so easy to cut and paste it and send it somewhere or to clip and re-syndicate it via email, RSS or social networks

I don't know about you but I love text.” Thanks Steve. I do too. I agree with all his points. I often get links to videos but I do not play them because the audio would bother others around me so I save them for later, and sometimes forget about them. However, I can silently read text as soon as I get it. This possibility was not always considered, as we shall see below.

Now the ancient Greeks who came up with the phonetic alphabet probably did not think about these implications. It is the invention that keeps on giving. As I wrote in Deloitte Declares We Are in a “Media Democracy,” the concept of an original version that could be preserved did not evolve until after written text. This was critical to the development of modern science among other things. In many ways, the epic poets, chief knowledge distributors of their day, made up the details as they went along. Text made available a visual record of thought, abolishing the need for an acoustic record and hence the need for rhythms. The first thing put into text was an epic poem but soon text inspired documents appeared. But there is more.

Like many great inventions, the uses of text slowly evolved. In fact, it appears that reading was often done aloud until after the 6th century. Ivan Illich relates that St. Augustine refrained from reading after his brothers went to sleep for fear of waking them. After the 6th century, silent reading became more commonplace, and such techniques such as tables of contents and indexes first appeared. These new devices allowed for random access to text information, a concept we take for granted now. Now people were free to read their emails and blog posts without disturbing their neighbors. What will be next for text?

Comments

[On Site SEO Services]

I completely agree. All the pretty graphics, flash videos, and youtube capabilities have flooded sites lately because they're more supposedly more appealing to the consumer, but I know anytime I click on a story I'm interested in at work and it's a video, I skip it because I can't exactly get away with the audio coming from my computer in a relatively quiet work space. Although I believe there is a place and time for all of those things, gimme a well written story any day over some fancy video. Thanks