3: From Orality to Literacy

Table of contents

1. Unit Overview
   1. A quick glimpse forward.
      1. Example 1
      2. Example 2
2. Phaedrus: Socrates’ Concern with Literary Revolution.
3. The Rise of Literacy and its Effect on Consciousness
   1. Ong’s Thesis
   2. B. Examples / Evidence
      1. 1) Example Development of Phonetic Alphabet
      2. 2) Example of Logic
4. Print Culture and its Effect on Consciousness
5. Social and Political World of the Print Medium

Unit Overview

The subtitle of Gleick’s text is a helpful guide to the trajectory we are going to try to trace over the next couple of weeks.

His subtitle reads:

“A history, a theory, and a flood”.

The subtitle points to a trajectory oriented around a central point.

There is a history leading up to a moment, then there is the birth of a specific theory, and following this birth is a flood of consequences.

This is the course of events we want to follow.

1) First we want to follow a history: namely the dialectic between technological development and the development of consciousness.

This stands in line with the McLuhan’s thesis: This history of technological shifts affects consciousness eventually leading us to a new idea, namely the idea of “information”.

2) Following this, we will turn to the new “theory of information”.

This is the “theory” that Gleick points to as a turning point – and today is sometimes called the “Informational Turn”.

3) And third we will look generally at the application of this new theory.

The dramatic impact of the “Informational Turn” on communication in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is what Gleick calls the “Flood”.

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In this lesson and the next, we are going to try to explore and discuss the first step in this history. Our general goal will simply be to watch as new media emerge and to reflect on our two large course questions: 1) how are these media shifts affect the message (consciousness), and 2) what are the pros and cons of these shifts; what new gains are made for human kind; what losses are suffered?

A quick glimpse forward.

Before jumping into the history, it will be helpful to pause and consider the larger problem that this history will lead to and the general nature of the solution that will be offered when the 20th century theory of information is offered. Having a little sense of the destination will bring some clarity and purpose to our observation of its history.

(Note: this is difficult, strange, and abstract material. So don’t get frustrated if it doesn’t make sense all at once. Simply read through it, struggle with it, and annotate it with questions and comments as you proceed.)

As stated, our goal is to use this book by Gleick to historically introduce ourself to the ways “the medium” affects the message and/or consciousness. We also want to see that this influence, in a kind of circular way, affects our understanding of just what a “medium” is and is not. In fact, the evolving understanding of a medium (is it voice? sound? ink? paper?) lies at the heart of the what philosophers today call “information theory”.

In 1981 Dretske said the following:

“The higher-level accomplishments associated with intelligent life can be seen as manifestations of progressively more efficient ways of handling and coding information. Meaning, and the constellation of mental attitudes that exhibit it, are manufactured products. The raw material is information.” (Dretske, 1981, p. vii.) See Philosophy of Information 2013, p. 43

The suggestion here is that scientific progress tracks with the development of more and more efficient ways of “encoding” information to the point that “information” and the “message/meaning” can be separated, making “information” into kind of medium at the highest level of abstraction.

But, as I hope we will see, from a historical point of view, this is like looking backward after the discovery has been made.

Through our historical march forward, we are going to try to watch for the slow discovery of this strange idea of “information” as a message-less immaterial medium.

At first glance, this is a very strange way to think about information.

We generally think about information as tied up with “semantics”, messages, or meaning. And we generally are not able to access this “meaning” without something physical (we have to hear it, see it on paper, etc).

Perhaps another reason this is strange is because we think of the message/meaning as what is immaterial, communicated to us through a material medium.

But Gleick is leading us toward is that claim “the informational turn” is tied to the discovery of the concept of information as kind of medium on “a higher level of abstraction” standing over and above other material media, standing at an “immaterial level”.

Strange as it may be, the story to be told is that the discovery or invention of the information as a “medium” at a higher level of abstraction has proved incredibly powerful, making scientific breakthroughs possible in a variety of fields, as well as making possible the scale and speed of communication that we wrestle with today.

Example 1

Let’s imagine we are in a classroom with a chalkboard and we place the following text on the board: “Add 3 cups of sugar and then stir.”

What is the message?

Well, of course, we can’t express it to each other without using another medium, the medium of sound and words. But it is something like: “directions for baking something”.

What is the medium of this message?

Chalk, chalk board, and light so that we can see the difference between chalk and chalkboard.

If we want to share this message with the class in the next room, how might we do that?

Where the message is tied to the medium, the message and the medium must be moved together.

In this case, moving the entire chalk board would be very expensive, making the speed and scale of transmission very slow and laborious.

We could copy that message from the chalk board to a piece of paper and the select a “courier” to pass the message to the next room.

And this is much more economical and this is the way much of communication has occurred for most of human history. But it is still demanding and expensive. To send a letter to China is slow and expensive process.

But let’s consider what it takes to “shout” that message to the other room.

There are some advantages here. No one has to leave, no one has to be sent. We can harness the “traveling” power of sound waves and allow them to carry the message.

But what is required in order to do this?

A re-encoding of the message from visual signs to aural signs.

How is this re-encoding possible? What is required for this re-encoding?

What is needed is a mind that understands the semantics or meaning of what has been encoded on the chalkboard. Such a mind can then re-encode the semantics into a new medium, in this case into sound waves.

Compared to the speed and scale of communication today, this requirement that the semantics of a message be understood first and then re-encoded before transmission remains very costly. It substantially delays the speed and scale of communication.

The “informational turn” coincides with the search for and discovery of a medium at level of abstraction higher than either sound or light waves. An abstraction that allows for the exchange of information without the understanding of semantics.

But what could that be?

Here we are talking about a level above all physical matter, at the level of logic, specifically the logic of difference. Difference can be found in any material form, and yet cannot be reduced to a particular material form. Thus “difference” stands above matter and this means that it can be encoded in any matter at a lower downstream level of abstraction.

The promise that lies within this level of abstraction is the possibility of the automatic re-encoding of message without the requirement that the semantics of that message be understood.

Such an abstraction provides a pathway for moving a message from sound waves to light-waves, letters, and words, without any human intermediary decoding and then re-coding the message. This is possible through the discovery of “information” as its own kind of medium, which, because it is more abstract, can seamlessly move from sound to light without needing (at its level of abstraction) to be decoded, understood, and then re-coded.

Claude Shannon, in his landmark paper A mathematical theory of communication, was the first to clearly identify the need for a concept of “information” divorced from both matter and semantics.

“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design.”

Example 2

With this first example, you might want to object and say, wait a minute!

The letter “a” is neither a visual nor aural symbol, its an idea with characteristics.

The idea of “a” when encoded in visual medium has this kind of “look” and when encoded in the aural medium has this kind of “sound”.

This objection is precisely on the right track. But hopefully, you can see that a shift in the level of abstraction has already occurred.

We abstracted from the visual “a” and the aural “a” to a common idea of “a” that does not have a material but only a logical existence.

Consider this an analogous to the “idea” of a triangle. We see triangles instantiated in “material forms” all the time. But none of these material triangles are perfect triangles. Their angles may be askew or their lines may not be perfectly straight. Thus a perfect triangle can never be seen, but only defined by its properties (e.g. \(a^{2} + b^2 = c^2\) etc.). Similarly, for a letter or word, it is easy to think of this as something that we see or hear, but Shannon will push us to think about the idea of the letter (or a word) as defined by its stastical properties: an “a” is really the first symbol in a series of 26, with a certain probability of appearance with in a given language. As we will see later, these properties are “measures” of difference, and the visual letter “a” is just one way of pointing to this difference.

If it is possible to think about the letter “a” at this level of abstraction, then we can imagine a machine that can measure the difference in light waves for input and reproduce that same difference in sound waves for output.

If “visual a” is just a way of encoding “information a” (or difference relative to other symbols in the set), and the “sound a” is a different way of encoding the “information a”, then if a machine knows how to “decode” each of these media, then something common will be found, and information can be transferred from one medium to another without requiring a mind to parse its semantics.

This is all preliminary. But it gives you a suggestion of where we are going. We still need to know more about how what this “informational a” is and how it can be reduced to “logical difference”. But this is part of the long history we want to follow, and we will return to Claude Shannon’s theory soon.

For the moment, let’s set these complications aside and consider the first media shifts that Gleick describes in chapters 1-3. Here we have the beginnings of the long slow march to the 20th century.

Phaedrus: Socrates’ Concern with Literary Revolution.

Let’s focus on Socrates’s critique of the emerging shift from a literary to an oral culture.

Socrates’ will be the first of many representatives that has concerns about a cultural media shift. We certainly want to see his concern, but we also want to be attentive to the “categories” he uses to make this critique. Let’s keep an eye out for the kinds of standards and norms he uses to decide when a medium is more or less beneficial.

To see this critique we need a little background.

Plato’s Phaedrus begins with the character Phaedrus praising the speech of Lysias, which Phaedrus turns out to possess in written form.

Socrates and Phaedrus decide to discuss it.

Socrates is less than impressed with the speech, and makes two speeches of his own, one that defends the thesis put forward by Lysias, and a second that counters it.

It is in the second speech that I think we see some of the classic Platonic categories that must function as criteria of evaluation.

So, let’s look there for a moment.

What does Socrates describe as the true desire of the soul?

He seems to indicate that the “true desire” of the soul is “union” with the ideal forms, the one (over the many).

“The rest of the souls are also longing after the upper world and they all follow, but not being strong enough they are carried round below the surface, plunging, treading on one another, each striving to be first.”

“The reason why the souls exhibit this exceeding eagerness to behold the plain of truth is that pasturage is found there, which is suited to the highest part of the soul; and the wing on which the soul soars is nourished with this. And there is a law of Destiny, that the soul which attains any vision of truth in company with a god is preserved from harm until the next period, and if attaining always is always unharmed.”

“The soul of a man may pass into the life of a beast, or from the beast return again into the man. But the soul which has never seen the truth will not pass into the human form. For a man must have intelligence of universals, and be able to proceed from the many particulars of sense to one conception of reason;-this is the recollection of those things which our soul once saw while following God-when regardless of that which we now call being she raised her head up towards the true being. And therefore the mind of the philosopher alone has wings; and this is just, for he is always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which He is what He is. And he who employs aright these memories is ever being initiated into perfect mysteries and alone becomes truly perfect. But, as he forgets earthly interests and is rapt in the divine, the vulgar deem him mad, and rebuke him; they do not see that he is inspired.”

How does Socrates describe the present human problem?

As I see it, the criteria of union with (or knowledge of) the unitary forms, rather than knowledge of distributed multiplicity, has a lot to do with Socrates’s ultimate preference for the oral medium over the literary medium. But we will come to that in a moment.

Rhetoric then becomes the central theme of the discussion: both false rhetoric/sophistry and true healing rhetoric.

According to Plato, why is rhetoric like medicine?

Why, because medicine has to define the nature of the body and rhetoric of the soul-if we would proceed, not empirically but scientifically, in the one case to impart health and strength by giving medicine and food in the other to implant the conviction or virtue which you desire, by the right application of words and training.

What are the three criteria of true rhetoric as described by Socrates? See p. 28-30.

Three things:

1) knowledge of the soul

“Then clearly, Thrasymachus or anyone else who teaches rhetoric in earnest will give an exact description of the nature of the soul; which will enable us to see whether she be single and same, or, like the body, multiform. That is what we should call showing the nature of the soul.”

2) knowledge of the different kinds of speeches/oratory

“He will explain, secondly, the mode in which she acts or is acted upon.”

3) he can provide justification for how he arranges different kinds of speeches for different kinds of souls. (The speaker can respond, adjust. the spoken word is alive.)

“Thirdly, having classified men and speeches, and their kinds and affections, and adapted them to one another, he will tell the reasons of his arrangement, and show why one soul is persuaded by a particular form of argument, and another not.”

We should emphasize this point as Walter Ong will talk about the importance of the written text as “dead”, not as a negative but as a positive.

So finally, we come to it: why is writing an inferior form of rhetoric?

Oratory, adjusts and adapts to its patient:

“Oratory is the art of enchanting the soul, and therefore he who would be an orator has to learn the differences of human souls-they are so many and of such a nature, and from them come the differences between man and man. Having proceeded thus far in his analysis, he will next divide speeches into their different classes: “Such and such persons,” he will say, are affected by this or that kind of speech in this or that way,” and he will tell you why.”

In contrast, the dead written word has at least three drawbacks:

1. mere appearance of knowledge
2. reminiscence instead of memory
3. writing cannot defend itself or adapt to different kinds of souls

“I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.”

Here are some of my thoughts to the above questions

1) Deep vs. Shallow.

Certainly, I think there are some losses incurred through this shift. People in oral cultures used to be able to remember a lot.

But of course, this a lot is relative. They could remember a lot, but no one can memorize the sum of what has become available for look-up through the shift to a literary culture.

Socrates’s ethical orientation toward the single and unitary forms suggest to me a reason why he does not care as much about these perceived advantages of literary culture.

A reference book about every kind of tiger or every kind of plant might be perceived by Socrates as somewhat useless given his goals.

If the goal is to transcend from an individual tiger, to the form of a tiger, to an animal, to something still higher, then empirical experience with individuals might be necessary for only a few tigers. Certainly, an exhaustive category of every instance of a tiger is irrelevant knowledge. The goal for Socrates is not to know every individual tiger, but to find the form of tiger.

Thus, oral culture might be one that is seen as providing us closer and closer, deeper and deeper knowledge of the unitary forms, while literary culture might seem to be exchanging this intimate knowledge of the forms for a more distributed, shallow knowledge of the many particulars, of what (from Socrates’s point of view) is ultimately irrelevant.

I use the word “shallow” here purposively as a kind of pointer toward repeated critiques of each media shift. As we will see later, Nicholas Carr’s central critique is that the use electronic media is producing “shallow” thinking.

2) Dynamism

I’d also like to draw your attention to the value Socrates places on the “dynamism” of the spoken word.

The ability to adjust, flex, and re-presentation of the same essential information is described by Socrates as an advantage of the spoken word. This lack of dynamism is considered a defect of the printed word.

I want to mark this and compare it to Ong’s description of the “advantages” of the written word. Ong considered the “fixedness” and “deadness” of the written text to also come with some advantages.

Nevertheless, it also worth noting that the electronic age has the potential to recover some of this dynamism (McLuhan even refers to the electric age as an age of “2nd Orality”). While still primarily dealing with written text, the digital text re-introduces the ability to automatically re-shape, re-form, and re-present a text tailored to the needs of the reader.

But again, while this dynamism has certainly been praised by pioneers of the internet as a major gain, critics, like Carr, worry that we will lose some of the advantages described by Ong that comes with the “fixed” nature of the written or printed text.

Let’s turn then to consider Ong’s thesis and the new advantages he sees from the transition to a literary culture.

The Rise of Literacy and its Effect on Consciousness

Ong’s Thesis

In his introduction, Ong writes:

“Oral cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche. Nevertheless, without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations…”

“More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.”

Let’s look at the opening claim in chapter 4.

What is the chief characteristic he notes about writing? Did we see a recognition of this characteristic in Plato’s text?

The written text is divorced from its author.

“Writing establishes what has been called ‘context-free’ language or ‘autonomous’ discourse.”

Why are written texts inherently more threatening? For example, why are they burned during revolutions and regime changes?

Written texts can’t be corrected. They can’t be clarified. The author no longer speaks. The text stands alone and continues to shout its message no matter how true or untrue it is.

Do we see something of this concern with the proliferation of fake-news online? Is this perhaps more troublesome with electronic text? Why or why not?

Such texts are harder to burn because they re-produces themselves more easily, and they are perhaps even more context-less, reducing themselves to fragmented assertions that are easily detached from argument, evidence, or context.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

This context-less, un-responsive text is, according to Ong, frequently associated with death.

The spoken word is alive, but the written word is dead.

Ong acknowledges this, but he also thinks there is a paradox hidden within this truth. What paradox does he have in mind here?

“The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living readers”

Surprisingly (and perhaps paradoxically) it is precisely the deadness of this text that makes it possible for its entrance into a plurality of new contexts.

Important This is a theme I think we’re going to return to often, and we need to mark it in order to constantly evaluate the trade-offs.

This theme is the tendency of media shifts toward “abstraction” and “de-coupling”. This abstraction or de-coupling continually tries to divorce a message from a more confining encoded material context.

Important And though there might be much to lament in this de-contextualization, at the same time, this de-contextualization makes it possible for a persistent and recognizable identity (perhaps an Idea or Form) to appear again in a plurality of new contexts.

This reappearance or “resurrection” is typically recognized as an extremely attractive part of the argument in favor of each new media shift.

It seems that Ong is headed in this direction, saying: the possibility of the resurrection or re-appearance of a core message has been an essential part of enabling scientific and cultural process.

This point seems to me to come across pretty clear on p. 81:

“To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. Such transformations can be uplifting. Writing heights consciousness. Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for a full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does.”

B. Examples / Evidence

It may be helpful if we quickly consider some examples.

1) Example Development of Phonetic Alphabet

Ong spends some time talking about the development of the phonetic alphabet.

Question: What were the competing writing systems?

“Pictographic”?

Question: Why is the phonetic alphabet a new kind of abstraction in comparison to other early writing systems?

The symbols have no “natural similitude” to the signified. Alone they signify nothing.

How was this different than pictographic writing? And what were some of the advantages?

Question: Why weren’t pictographics able to facilitate this reproduction of the spoken word?

Question: How does the creation of the phonetic word change our consciousness?

The word itself, as word, becomes its own “thing” and thus a focus of study and examination.

In the pictographic world, the written word and the spoken word both point to an external reality in two different ways. They are vehicles to the same signified thing.

But in the phonetic system, the written word, points to “a word” as its own kind of thing, an entity, that has meaning and reality. It becomes possible to think about and to discuss the word “apple” for example independently of any concern or consideration for an apple somewhere in the world.

Let’s conclude this example with a revealing quotation from Ong:

“The reason why the alphabet was invented so late…For the alphabet operates more directly on sound as sound than the other scripts…”

“…Sounds, as has earlier been explained, exists only when it is going out of existence…The alphabet implies that matters are otherwise, that a word is a thing not an event…a picture, say, of a bird does not reduce sound to space, for it represents an object, not a word.

…The alphabet, though it probably derives from pictographs, has lost all connection with things as things. It represents sound itself as a thing, transforming the evanescent world of sound to the quiescent, quasi-permanent world of space.”

2) Example of Logic

The suggestion is that the transition to the written phonetic word, as a transition from word as event to word as thing created the possibility for “second order discourse”. These kinds of analyses would be difficult without the permanence of the word as “thing”.

Ong writes:

“The distancing which writing effects develops a new kind of precision…”

“But written words sharpen analysis”

Ong notes that: the removal of the word from its spoken context requires every more precision.

Why?

Because the removal of this context removes hundreds of “communicative redundancies” that help sure the success of a transmission.

“to make yourself clear without gesture, without facial expression, without intonation, without a real hearer, you have to foresee circumspectly all possible meanings a statement may have for any possible reader in any possible situation, and you have to make your language work so as to come clear all by itself, with no existential context. The need for this exquisite circumspection makes writing the agonizing work it commonly is.”

Perhaps you’ve experienced this through the inefficiency of an email. Sometimes it takes 20 minutes to write an email to address a question that would have taken 30 seconds in an oral conversation.

The ironic point, however, is that the reduction of these helpful informational redundancies forced writing to increase the precision and clarity of the core communication. The effort to achieve this precision was not necessary in a spoken context because there was so much other contextual information available to help clarify the message.

In short, while the same message was being communicated, this new precision allowed that message to be communicated with more accuracy, therefore needing less contextual information.

This new kind of precision, along with the persistence of the word as a thing rather than an event, created the possibility of new kinds of thought, new kinds of second-order discourses, and new forms of human consciousness.

Important This dialectic between the removal of redundancies and the effect of increased “cognitive” precision is a critical insight that we will meet again when we look the new concept of information that emerges in the 20th century. For now this point is worth taking extra note!

Gleick describes an interesting example which he takes from some research by a Russian linguistic, Aleksandr Romanovich Luria. (I believe he learns through Ong, but I wasn’t able to track it down.)

“In the study, they asked a typical question: - In the far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Sembia is in the Far North and there is always snow there. - What color are the bears? - Typical response: ‘I don’t know. I’ve seen a black bear. I’ve never seen any others…Each locally has its own animals’ - By contrast a man who has just learned to read and write responds: ‘to go by your words, they should all be white”

Gleick gleans from this:

“Literate people take for granted their own awareness of words, along with the array of word related machinery: classification, reference, definition.”

And Gleick’s conclusion is the following:

“The persistence of writing made it possible to impose structure on what was known about the world and, then on what was known about knowing. As soon as one could set words down, examine them, look at them anew the next day, and consider their meaning, one became a philosopher, and the philosopher began with a clear slate and a vast project of definition to undertake.”

Print Culture and its Effect on Consciousness

We’ve been talking a lot so far about the development of abstractions.

Briefly, I’d like to think a little bit now about the role of of increased abstractions within the world of print itself.

In a later chapter, Ong points out an important fact:

“Manuscript cultures remained largely oral-aural even in retrieval of material preserved in texts. Manuscripts were not easy to read, by later typographic standards, and what readers found in manuscripts they tended to commit at least somewhat to memory. Relocating material in a manuscript was not always easy. Memorization was encouraged…”

He points out that even in early print books, visual practices seem counter-intuitive to us. They seem to make reading more difficult not less difficult.

Consider the example image Ong provides on pg. 118

And he asks an interesting question:

“Why does the original, presumably more ‘natural’ procedure seem wrong to us? Because we feel the printed words before us as visual units.”

It seems to me that part of the answer lies in the fact that we are the products of changes in book culture. It is NOT as simple as saying we prefer the modern book and the modern typeset book over the 16th century printing because it is “naturally clearer or better”. Rather our conscious expectation of what a book should do, what we should do with a book, etc., is itself of a product of centuries of book development. And therefore the modern book looks/feels more “natural” or “clearer” as a direct result of the media shaping our expectations of what kinds of activities the book should and should not promote.

This is a consciousness that the 15th or 16th century reader of the printed book did not yet have.

Ong says something similar:

“Evidently, in processing the text for meaning, the sixteenth century was concentrating less on the sight of the word and more on its sound than we do.”

And thus, what we are talking about here is the development of the fairly modern notion of “sustained silent reading” as a consequence of slow cycle shifts in a material medium. (In fact I was taught this in elementary school, when we had SSR time, “sustained silent reading” time: clear evidence of the fact that far from being “natural”, we are educated into developing certain kinds of reading habits over others.)

Many people attribute the development of personal silent reading, not just to the development of print itself, but to a series of modifications that led us to favor the visualization of the printed text in certain ways.

And a lot of fuss is made about the way the printing press and developments in typography situate words more firmly within visual “space” than ever before. Not just metaphorically, but literally words are printed strategically within the context of whitespace and that localization is rich with implicit meaning; meaning that we instinctively interpret and “de-code” but rarely ever thematize.

Let’s look a few quotations from Carr who describes this process and summarizes the work of Paul Saenger.

“It’s hard for us to imagine today, but no spaces separated the words in early writing. In the books inked by scribes, words ran together without any break across every line on every page, in what’s now referred to as scriptura continua. The lack of word separation reflected language’s origins in speech. When we talk, we don’t insert pauses between each word–long stretches of syllables flow unbroken from our lips. It would never have crossed the minds of the first writers to put blank spaces between words. They were simply transcribing speech, writing what their told them to write.

“The lack of word separation, combined with the absence of word order conventions, placed an “extra cognitive burden on ancient readers, explains Paul Saenger in Space between Words, his history of the scribal book…

“The slow, cognitively intensive parsing of a text made the reading of books laborious. It was also the reason no one, other than the odd case like Ambrose, read silently…”

“The placing of spaces between words alleviated the cognitive strain involved in deciphering text, making it possible for people to read quickly, silently, and with greater comprehension. Such fluency had to be learned. It required complex changes in the circuitry of the brain… What we today call “deep-reading” becomes possible. By “altering the neurophysiological process of reading,” word separation “freed the intellectual faculties of the reader,” Saenger writes: “even readers of modest intellectual capacity could read more swiftly, and they could understand an increasing number of inherently more difficult texts.”

“Readers didn’t just become more efficient. They also became more attentive. To read a long book silently required to an ability to concentrate over a long period of time, to “lose oneself” in the pages of a book, as we now say…”

Social and Political World of the Print Medium

Finally, I wonder if we could end with just one more example of how medium shapes consciousness, again, specifically thinking about the way the printed book as a medium is shaping our understanding of fundamental concepts.

But in this case, I’d like to step back from the book as hand-written or printed and think about the book as an artifact in a social-economy.

McLuhan’s thesis implies that appreciating a “medium” involves understanding the vast system it is a part of. Therefore, understanding the book medium requires more than just focusing on a physical book on a desk, but requires consideration of the entire productive system which makes a book possible.

In particular, I’d like to ask you about our modern understanding of this word “published” and how the specific medium of print has shaped and determined our understanding of what it means to “publish” something or to make something “public”.

What does it mean for something to be “published” and to what degree does that align or not align with “making something public”?

If I post a blog entry on a public website, is it public? is it “published”?

With some reflection, we can recognize that several distinct and separable functions are combined in this word “published”, in which the task of making something accessible to the public is only one small part.

In other words, today it is possible to conceive of making something public, separable from all these other functions.

Prior to the digital revolution, for example, this was not possible. In this case, the additional tasks we associate with publication (review, quality control) were tightly coupled with the task of “making publicly accessible”.

In a world where it is only possible to distribute information via printed copies of a text, and in a world where a printing machine is expensive and typesetting is laborious, a printer has to be assured of the “marketability” of a text before they could commit to “making it public”.

The ability to make something public was economically tied to the ability to sell and to recoup expenses. And thus to make something publicly accessible in mass was necessarily tied to a prior step of curation and gate-keeping (through steps like peer-review, quality checks, and editorial review).

In the end, a kind of law or axiom emerges that follows as direct result of the available means of production.

Maxim: “What has not been reviewed, cannot been seen, accessed, or made public.”

Under these conditions, no one could ask the question whether it would be good or bad to make something “public” prior to review because this just wasn’t possible.

What interests me here is the degree to which this maxim is no longer required for technological reasons, no longer required by the means of production, but continues to operate due to the lingering forms of social interaction inherited from the logic of an earlier technology and productive system.

During times of technology shifts, Marx speaks of a contradiction between the “new means of productions” and the “old modes of social interaction”. I think we are seeing something similar here.

In the case of our particular example, we might ask: to what degree do we continue to allow review and gate-keeping to function as a determination of what can be accessed (made public), despite the fact that the “means of making public” no longer requires this?

Why not use quality control and review function as kind of filtering of what is already public rather than determining factor of what gets made public?

When the cost of making something available in mass is cheap, why shouldn’t we let accessibility come first, and then let review function as a form of filtering?

This would give us the advantage of by-passing the problem of gate-keeping where a handful of people get to decide what the rest of the world gets to see and does not get to see. It would also still preserve the benefits of quality control as a form of curation that would draw reader’s attention to what has been recommended as being of high quality.

In other words, the traditional book economy of publication has enforced a kind of either/or. It is either reviewed/approved and therefore public or it is not reviewed/approved and therefore it is not public.

Today, it seems like we have the possibility of a both/and. Something can be accessible independent of review and it can be reviewed and this review status can be communicated.

(If you’re interested in this topic, I’ve done some work in this area. See my article Decoupling Quality Control and Publication. It’s a technical article, but it tries to show that technologically, this kind of publication is possible, and therefore resistance to this approach comes from social inertia rather than technical obstacles. Feel free to annotation this article with questions as well!)

In sum, our persistence within the old model is the product of a particular form of consciousness that sees “publication” as something which present forms of media no longer require.

This view is well summed up in the following citation.

Although articles were sometimes peer-reviewed, only well after the second world war was peer review introduced as a routine process for virtually all articles submitted to journals. This served various purposes, not least to limit the amount that was published, as printing and distributing journals was expensive and a judgement had to be made as to what was truly worthwhile spending scarce money on, which led to many journals selecting on criteria of perceived quality and relevance to their intended readership. The time the process took between initial submission and publication was usually quite long, sometimes very long. With the advent of the internet, the need for print and physical distribution, and the costs associated with that, disappeared. This could have meant a complete re-think of the way science was communicated, but traditions stuck, and most of scientific communication still takes place on the old print paradigms, devised in the print era. blog.scielo.org

As we can see here, this is an active and ongoing conversation that many scholars and writers are thinking about.

But one thing is for sure: the ability to see these problems and imagine alternative solutions requires that one recognize just how much an existing medium is shaping habits of thought. Thus, to think beyond these habits, we must first recognize that these habits exists and then critically examine them, so that we can think beyond them.