The development of civilization has seen a shift from the more informal traditions of an oral society where people told stories and verbally relayed information from tribe to tribe to the more formal tradition of the written word. Thanks to Gutenberg and his printed bible in 1455, when something is credible and important, we refer to it as “gospel.”
Having work appear “in print” has always been a measure of success in a written culture according to Naomi S. Baron in “Always On: “Language in an Online and Mobile World.” (p. 10). As an enlightened race, we started out as an oral culture–from fifth-century Athens where the Iliad and the Odyssey were passed on orally . . . to the middle ages in England where books were like a rare musical score kept locked away . . . to the Queen Elizabeth I era and the dawn of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre tradition. With the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, we launched headlong into being a culture that valued the written word. According to Baron, the attributes of a written culture are:
- Enough people to create and distribute the written word
- A valued attitude toward authorship
- Separate conventions between speech and writing. (Writing having its own punctuation, grammatical conventions, etc…)
- A cognitive dimension whereby we are not simply reading something, but the ideas themselves impact us emotionally or intellectually. (pp. 186-88)
Our modern written culture is being transformed at astonishing rates. As we’re bombarded with various sources of media (print, online, video, audio and their various mashups!), we will transcend simple intellectual impact of this cognitive dimension. We have the potential to emerge as a race of intellects that goes beyond written culture as we experience a renaissance of sorts that has never before been experienced. This will not be the simple “epistolary renaissance” that some scholars predict, but a complete shakeup of how we use and assimilate information and ideas and one that encourages us to think deeper and more clearly than ever.
