Communication in Orality and the Advent of Writing - Communication Of Ideas In Oral Cultures, Written Communication Of Ideas, Literate And Illiterate Communication, Paper And Communication
human
The communication of ideas is not basically different from any other type of human communication. It is founded on the unique human skill of speech, a highly developed and formalized system of audio communication, which links with animal sounds and other forms of the communicative act but is infinitely more sophisticated. The jury is still out on the question of the genetic component in spoken language, but that need not affect this analysis of its consequences.
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The development of human society over the long term is affected by the speed and accuracy with which ideas are transferred from one individual or group to another. In the Old Stone Age, or Paleolithic period, such a process was slow since communication in the sense of physical movement was slow. And with oral communication, virtually all transfer had to be face-to-face, a matter of constant conver…
Turning speech into a visual, material object also makes possible the communication of ideas and information at a distance. An individual can send a message far away without being involved face-to-face. That has had disadvantages as well as advantages. The former mean that verbal messages became divorced from the wider context of speech, so that one misses the accompanying gestures and tonality an…
The greatest division of this kind was between those who could read and those who could not, a division that applied not only to cultures, literate and nonliterate, but to individuals within societies, literate and illiterate. For the first five thousand years of the history of writing until the end of the nineteenth century, writing was (with a few, marginal exceptions) acquired only by a minorit…
In Asia, the expense of communication was in copying (and creation) rather than materials; the use of paper enabled ideas and information to be communicated rapidly from East to West. The notion of zero and Arabic numerals that made such a difference to mathematical calculation were just part of a transfer that paved the way for the Renaissance and the "scientific revolution," includ…
The balance of intellectual power partly shifted to Europe with the advent of printing following Gutenburg. Its success was partly due to the great advantage of the alphabet, which enabled movable type to be used with a minimum number of units, unlike the more complex logographic scripts of the Far East. Paper was essential in this shift since it provided a flexible, smooth, and inexpensive surfac…
The speed and openness of the communication of ideas and information generally is increased even more by the appearance of the mass media, including electronic ones. In a sense mass media began in the early days of printing with broad-sheets and newsletters. Indeed printing itself eventually enabled the large-scale production of almanacs as well as of textbooks for schools, as the price decreased.…
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