The Written Word

The art and science of writing has been a part of human life for centuries. It was the big innovation that led humanity away from passing information through word of mouth, and made the earliest forms of distant mass communication possible. By writing down thoughts and ideas into cave walls, stone slabs and, eventually, paper, humans enabled others to know what was in their minds without the need to personally be there. The written word has been an integral part of human communication since the Sumerian clay tablets of circa 3500 B.C. But, I believe textual literacy is more than just a form of communication; it is a standard followed by other forms of communications that will never go out of style, while pure textual communication, on the other hand, is already past its prime.

Textual literacy is a standard that is used by all other forms of communication. The desire to understand the world around them has driven humans to name and define what they see and experience. The result is the creation of standards, or in other words, dozens of languages each with their own writing style and texts. A person watching a movie may not fully understand its content without the aid of written words and speech. Even the earliest silent movies had text inserts called “insertitles” to communicate their content to the audience. The comedian Groucho Marx even experimented with words to gain popularity for his act, where the words ‘disagreeable’ and ‘distasteful’ “never got more than titters… but ‘nauseating’ drew roars”. Today, it is almost impossible to participate in any type of communication that does not use text. A public speaker may refer to his note-cards, the plot of a TV-drama may involve a love-letter, even telephone conversations have to be initiated by typing in the numbers or names of our contacts. The written word has infiltrated almost every aspect of our lives, and it has a very solid advantage that makes it indispensable.

The concept of speed becomes irrelevant when communicating through the written word. According to Marshall McLuhan, reading lets us “ponder what the author is saying; we can go back and reread and think about passages of text and develop arguments for or against points that are made, in ways that we simply cannot do when watching someone speak or listening to them”. In addition, written text also enables us to go back to the arguments years after originally reading them, letting new experiences guide our thoughts to see the same words in a new perspective. This brings the issue of information storage to attention.

One can argue that information can be stored in other forms such as optical drives, micro-chips and magnetic tapes. But these forms of storage may not be the best option. An ideal storage device must perform well in five areas: longevity, capacity, portability, accessibility, and reproducibility. Written text trumps other forms of information storage in three of the five areas: longevity, accessibility, and reproducibility. Books can easily last centuries if preserved properly, the oldest book known to man being “2.5 thousand years old”. Unlike computers, books don’t need electricity or batteries to be accessible, and can be copied with nothing more than a sharp stick and ink. While these qualities makes books valuable to preserve important information, everyday communications use the more portable medium of DVDs, flash-drives and “the cloud”. These storage devices have very high capacity to store information. For example, the micro-SD card can store 64GBs worth of information. This tempts the users to go beyond storing just words and phrases, to include photos, videos and even 3D-models.

Todd Gitlin mentions in his book that life is now played out against a “shimmering multitude of images and sounds…supplemented by words, numbers, symbols, phrases, fragments all passing through screens…”. Mass communication has shifted from pure textual communication via books and newspapers, into more visual mediums such as television and the internet. The internet itself, in its early days, used very little graphic content. Most of it was text based websites with a few low-resolution pictures thrown somewhere. Today, even the simplest websites add graphics to their content in order to attract more traffic. Google, for example, creates interactive doodles on most special holidays to pay homage to the occasion. This phenomenon is not limited to the 21st century. It also applies to street signs and billboards in earlier times, where “traditional signs offered useful information, but the gaudier, more colossal electric displays heightened the sensational impact without adding information”. Another sign that textual communication is past its prime is the fact that “with only three exceptions, the world’s largest media companies do not own newspapers”. Magazines, on the other hand, have steadily gained popularity since the early nineteenth century where “stories and images entered the typical household in ever-accelerating numbers”. Today’s magazines are filled with images that complement the content.

In the end, while books and novels have created their own niche in human lives, pure textual communication has steadily been decreasing in popularity and usage. However, the written word has penetrated other, more popular means of mass communication such as movies, news- and TV-shows, making it impossible to even consider the end of near-universal textual literacy.