More is Less — What Future for the Written Word?

Abstract

I really do have to start with some – ologies. The recent, in history of the earth terms, advent of humans is only known to us through the realms of archaeology and anthropology. Modern humans have had an advanced culture for 10,000 years and the story starts, so far as we know at present, with sumeriology: the study of the ancient Sumerian peoples. It is one thing to dig up postholes, hearth places and pottery shards and deduce, many would say speculate, on the people whose history they represent. It is quite another when those people have left written information. Deduction and speculation then give way to hard facts. Ancient civilizations from at least the Neolithic period have left signs and patterns scratched onto a variety of surfaces, but what these were and what they mean is generally unknown. Many may have been economic tallies or a pictographic proto-writing system; who knows? It is only as emerging technology brought people into the bronze age that true writing developed and it is a near certainty that Sumerian pictographic protowriting developed into writing. This was the world’s oldest known true writing system, an arrangement of wedge shaped marks that we call cuneiform. So, from Sumeria to Assyria and, therefore Assyriology which is the archaeological, historical, and linguistic study of ancient Mesopotamia and the related cultures that used cuneiform writing. All this we know because we have found many examples of the writing and it has been deciphered and translated. This from early in the 3rd millennium BCE. There is other writing, more ideographic, found in the early Egyptian pyramids, religious texts to direct the pharaohs on their journey into the afterlife; this too has been deciphered and translated. Before the millennium was out the first novels appeared of which the most complete is the Epic of Gilgamesh. This is a story of gods and demons and a striving for immortality. It also includes a story which may be the origins of the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark. So, we know something of ancient people, who lived nearly 5000 years ago because they wrote on clay tablets which they fired, later they carved stone or wrote on papyrus or painted on walls. All durable media that have survived. Bronze Age people and later Iron Age people left records that survive as have the histories of more recent people. From the 15th century things got a lot easier after the introduction of the Gutenburg press. Books, which up to that time had been hand-written, could now be mass produced. Information about the world and everything in it just kept appearing, more and more and more of it. Maybe it all started to change in the early years of the 19th century when Jacquard invented his process for programming the patterns on cloth produced by a loom. His advance was to use punched cards to order the pattern of the loom’s weave. Changes in the pattern could be made by simply changing cards. An advance that was an important conceptual precursor to the development of computer programming. The computer age had begun. Charles Babbage knew of Jacquard’s work and planned to use punched cards to store programs for his Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine was to be a mechanical general-purpose computer. Although never built in his