257. Orality and Literacy

2025-01-21

Our mental landscape is irrevocably bound up in variations of 26 characters, but we’re historical exceptions.

Links for the Curious

Dissemination (J. Derrida, 1972) - http://archive.org/details/derrida-dissemination
List of languages by first written account - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_languages_by_first_written_account&oldid=1266554494
Literacy (Roser, M. & Ortiz-Ospina, E., 2018) - https://ourworldindata.org/literacy
Literacy in Traditional Societies (Goody, J., 1975)
Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word (Ong, W. J., 2012)
Silent reading - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Silent_reading&oldid=1258004457
The Consequences of Literacy (Goody, J. & Watt, I., 1963) - http://www.jstor.org/stable/177651
Phaedrus (Plato, 360BC) - https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html
The Power of Names (Graham, L., 2011) - http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14746700.2011.547020
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling (Chiang, T., 2013)
‘There’s been a genuine vibe shift and it is no longer “cool” to be—’ You bolt awake. It is 2600 BC in holy Sumer. You are a scribe lately experimenting with rotating pictograms into an abstract, repeatable, recombinant logosyllabary. Your work, all of it, must be destroyed. (Jacob Bacharach @jakebackpack, 2025) - https://x.com/jakebackpack/status/1878559969735573709
Word And Object, Quine (Von Quine, 1977) - http://archive.org/details/word-and-object-quine
Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years (Standage, T., 2013)