Here is an interesting post, Language is not writing, from the Economist. The post points out that, “Humans began speaking many tens of thousands of years before the first writing… Every healthy adult and older child in the world speaks, in one of 6,000-7,000 languages. A few hundred languages, at most, are written at all seriously. If writing were "language", we would render much of the world without language… But writing is an unusual skill recent in human history and not common to the majority of the world's people, who don't write on a regular basis. If language were only writing, it probably could never come into being.” All good points.
Let’s look at the beginning of writing. The invention of the phonetic alphabet around 700 B.C. made enabled a number of unforeseen and unintended capabilities.
In the pre-writing oral tradition, the conditions for the preservation of ideas were mnemonic. To promote memory, instruction and knowledge preservation made use of verbal and musical rhythms; however, these rhythms placed severe limits on the verbal arrangement of what was said, as in Homer, and the need to memorize used up cognitive energy that otherwise could have been devoted to learning. Because of the heavy memory load, the epic poets did not actually memorize content verbatim; they created new versions from a set of possibilities as they went along.
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 and essential for many forms of instruction. 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. Greek thought changed and such works as Plato’s “Republic” are described by some scholars as an attack on the oral poetic tradition of knowledge distribution (see Eric Havelock’s “Origins of Western Literacy” or his better known “Preface to Plato”).
However, writing does not address all issues of communication. As Plato wrote in Phaedrus, in the oral tradition learning was based on dialogue, while in the written tradition, the learner has little, if any, ability to converse with the knowledge creator. Enhanced knowledge often only comes out of the interaction of two viewpoints. Conversation is needed.
This is where the new Web comes in as social media allows for more conversations than occurred in the one-way broadcast of content in older communication modes. While much of these exchanges happen through writing, more people are getting drawn in these conversations, as there is dramatic rise in user generated content. Now with the rise of the richer media of audio and video even more people can get drawn into these global conversations and writing will not be a barrier.
I am going to provide some more on this tomorrow.
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