0.4 Three special events in the history of technology for creating  (Page 3/12)

Many of the stories in the oral culture were structured in the style of poetry with rhyme, rhythm, and form toaid the memory. The telling of these stories was a performance by a highly skilled person with many tricks to help him/her remember andthe ability to improvise and create on the fly. If a person in a story fell from favor, then they might disappear from the nexttelling. The story was “alive,” continuously adapting and changing.

After writing came into general use, the culture of communication changed. Poetry evolved into a morecompact and efficient prose, as memory aids were no longer needed. Similarly, the need to improvise vanished, and a larger group ofpeople was able to tell (read) stories, with more “accuracy” but at a cost. The stories become frozen, perhaps even “dead.” They becameseparated from the teller and the listener, with an independent existence in written form.

But there’s a larger point here. Writing would also significantly add to the power [emphasis added] of the word,and in so doing it would change the nature of what could be thought. [Stephens, p. 17]

The earliest writing used symbols that directly depicted the object or idea being described. In the west,this “short hand” evolved into phonetic symbols representing sounds in speech rather than the objects themselves. This early writingwas only loosely tied to language, but the arrangement changed to a tight connection when the phonetic alphabet evolved and people wereable to read aloud.

The pictorial writing systems required an enormous number of symbols, but the change to a phonetic systemreduced the number, similar to today’s western alphabets. The number of phonetic symbols, in fact, was initially too small sincethe alphabet had no vowels, only consonants. Words and sentences were not separated, and there were no paragraphs or chapters. Likeshorthand, the written language was a prompt, enabling the reader to “know” what had been written (probably because he already knewit). Indeed, a fully phonetic alphabet, the separation of words, and the development of punctuation, all of which enabled silentreading (which occurred around the 1500s), were major advances in the technology of writing and the book. This was the second phasein the development of writing, where unanticipated developments were changing everything.

As the change toward literacy has occurred, it has produced changes in the configuration of human society. . . .An act of vision was offered in place of an act of hearing as the means of communication, and as the means of storing communication.The adjustment that it caused was in part social, but the major effect was felt in the mind and the way the mind thinks as itspeaks. (Emphasis added) [Havelock, p. 100]

In addition to much-improved efficiency, the development of writing techniques brought along other ideas andchanges.

The printed text is supposed to represent the works of an author in definitive or ‘final’ form. For print iscomfortable only with finality. … Print culture of itself has a different mindset. It tends to feel a work as “closed,” set offfrom other works, a unit in itself. Print culture gave birth to the romantic notions of “originality” and “creativity,” which set apartan individual work from other works even more, seeing its origins and meaning as independent of outside influence, at least ideally. [Ong, pp. 132-133]