Pointed Sticks and iPads: Writing Technology

Writing is a strange thing, and difficult to explain. How has the scrawl of symbols come to represent the primary means of transmitting information, as well as the primary (oh, alright then, a primary) means of creative expression? If you wanted to trace the history of art, of painting, you can look at the extant cave paintings in Altamaria and make sense of them: they look like the stuff they’re supposed to look like, and you can chart a largely accurate (if immensely reductive) up to contemporary painting.

Text, though, is a way of encrypting language, which itself is fundamentally metaphorical: a much trickier course to steer. It’s an important one to understand, though, as the march of technology has made text ever-more ubiquitous and central to our daily lives. We call portable computers tablets because they fulfil largely the same role as the stone tablets the Sumerians kept their accounts on did: they provide a gateway to the knowledge encoded in text.

Origins

The earliest historical movements towards writing are shrouded in a particularly black kind of mystery, because, well, we don’t have any of them written down. (This is largely the point at which we distinguish history from prehistory: history is the study of the past of which we have written records, and thus something concrete to start with, prehistory is much murkier and conjecture-based.) Scholars largely agree that the earliest form of writing to be wielded by humanity was devised by the Sumerians, an ancient civilization from southern Mesopotamia, in what we now call Iraq, and it came into being around 3600 BCE.

The creation of things like imaginative literature baffled Darwin, who could not see what possible evolutionary purpose they might serve, and sure enough, writing has a practical, mundane origin. It was first used by a Sumerian scribe as an adaptable and sophisticated accounting tool for keeping inventories. The tablet below shows some food rationing:

Very quickly the pictograms of the cuneiform script became stylized, and pushed towards the representation of abstract concepts which we take as the defining feature of modern script. The cuneiform probably had some kind of influence on the development of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, though they sprung up with a large degree of independence. Discerning hieroglyphs is a difficult and confusing process: some of them represent sounds, some of them represent ideas, or classes of word– only with the discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799 were they deciphered with any confidence.

The first alphabet (technically an abjad) came into being around 1700 BCE as Semitic peoples working in Ancient Egypt began to map their own language around the hieroglyphs. This alphabet would turn into the Proto-Canaanite, which in turn would become the Phoenician alphabet. This is the germ of all Western writing: Ancient Greek sailors in the Eastern Mediterranean would copy this very directly from the Phoenicians they traded with. We call it “the alphabet” because of the words the Greeks imported from the Phoenicians: aleph, which looked like an Ox’s head in profile, and was the Western Semitic word for Ox, and bet, which looks like the plan of a house, as in “Bethlehem”, which literally means “house of loaves”. The Greeks, though, made the key innovation of noting vowel sounds, which the Phoenicians didn’t (modern Hebrew still doesn’t). For the first time, every sound their language contained could be represented by a symbol.

From here it’s relatively well-charted and plain sailing to the writing system we use in English: the Romans adapted and started using the Ancient Greek alphabet, conquered Europe, and so most of these countries write their language in what we call the Latin alphabet, and would propagate this as they colonized new lands.

Takeover

Only the scribes of Ancient Egypt could read and write, and the act of writing was used only to exercise the power of the state. Writing remained distinctly the preserve of the ruling classes for centuries: it was an expensive, time consuming act. Every piece of writing needed to be made by hand, and as writing became collected into books, those, too, would need to be copied, by hand, one at a time. Johannes Gutenberg, a German blacksmith, changed the course of history forever when he invented the printing press, a machine which, in 1450, could print from moveable type: the amount of writing that could be produced, and read, suddenly hit an exponential spike.

The speed at which information could now be disseminated had predictably widespread and profound effects: the remarkable late-blooming and literary-focussed Renaissance in England, for instance, but perhaps more importantly, it provided the structure for Enlightenment. The biggest refocus from superstition to logic and empiricism needed a means to sink into the popular consciousness, and printed material provided that.

Noble times, maybe, but writing still largely follows the Ancient Egyptian model of being used the few—the well-minded few, who would spark the loftily-idealed French and American Revolutions—but still the few, as literacy levels remained low, and the power of the ideas transmitted in writing remained within the grasp of a few benevolent despots.

Writing is Power

In Claude Lévi-Strauss’s book Tristes Tropiques, purportedly a memoir but actually a cocktail of sociological fieldwork, philosophical meditation, and travel writing, the author describes his stay with the Nambikwara, an indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest. The Nambikwara were, and are, largely untouched by Western civilization, and possess no concept of writing. Lévi-Strauss, who has been dutifully recording his time with the Nambikwara using a pencil and paper, arranges for himself and his companions to exchange some gifts with them. Lévi-Strauss’s gifts are, impishly enough, pencils and paper.

Then, one day, I saw that they were all busy drawing wavy     horizontal lines on the paper. What were they trying to do? I     could only conclude that they were writing— or, more exactly,     that they were trying to do as I did with my pencils… their     leader saw further into the problem. Doubtless he was the only     one among them to have understood what writing was for. So     he asked me for one of my notepads; and when we were     working together he did not give me his answers in words, but     traced a wavy line or two on the paper and gave it to me, as if I     could read what he had to say.

The bathos of the situation is not lost on Lévi-Strauss, but the phrase “what writing was for” hints at the leader’s more sinister intentions. The passage continues:

With a show of hesitation he looked up and down his 'list' for     the objects to be given in exchange for his people's presents.     So-and-so was to receive a machete in return for his bow and     arrows, and another a string of beads in return for his     necklaces— and so on for two solid hours. What was he hoping     for? To deceive himself, perhaps: but, even more, to amaze his     companions and persuade them that his intermediacy was     responsible for the exchanges. He had allied himself with the     white man, as equal with equal, and could now share in his     secrets.

Lévi-Strauss makes the bold play of blowing up this incident to the macrocosm, arguing that writing does not perform a great deal in the way of aiding learning and creativity, but is very effective at controlling people as large civilizations (city- and nation-states) develop: “the primary function of writing, as a means of communication, is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.” It’s hard to agree that writing hasn’t pushed knowledge and artistic expression onwards, but it being used as a tool of oppression stands strong.

Jacques Derrida would famously critique this interpretation in Of Grammatology, in “The Violence of the Letter”, arguing that the Nambikwara speech and ability to name and classify Lévi-Strauss’s own writing constituted a form of writing in itself, albeit one less privileged by the West: “It is quite evident that a literal translation of the words that mean 'to write' in the languages of peoples with writing would also reduce that word to a rather poor gestural signification.” Derrida, characteristically, makes us question our deepest assumptions on the nature of writing, but both Lévi-Strauss’s thesis and Derrida’s critique have a special relevance for writing in the internet age.

Present

Perhaps a little surprisingly, text rules the roost in the post-internet, mobile era. Take your smartphone or tablet, or any electronic device, really. If you had to switch off either text, or pictures, video, music and haptic feedback, which would render the device useless? Text functions as the hub around which multimedia experiences are built, the fundamental way we encode information, and quite possibly the key towards universalization.

Derrida and Lévi-Strauss, in different ways, try to get at the way certain kinds of text are oppressive, and force people into their way of thinking. If the internet can be rolled out worldwide, it can bring these differences, and special privileges of certain systems of communication crashing down. Online translation is one way this can work, but with the array of “writing” systems that can be accessed through the web, translation can start to cross what we might have previously thought of as boundaries; the kind of boundaries Lévi-Strauss and Derrida railed against.

Future

Just as the printing press and typewriters before it offered a range of new possibilities for the written word, the internet and its miniature computers have offered writers an array of new means to express their meaning. Emoji (sometimes called emoticons) are used more often than ever to clarify or obfuscate text messages, and have their origin in written characters, e.g., a colon and a closing bracket representing smiley face. There’s a weird circularity to it when we think back the the letter aleph in Phoenician representing an ox’s head. Here at Rap Genius, a number of users are experimenting with integrating non-alphanumeric characters into the platform and seeing what kind of meaning this pressure creates. It’s yet to be written.