Written by Hithesh Shaji
May 22, 2023
Human language and thought were originally oral. Oral language is natural to humans and dominated majority of human history, whereas writing is an artificial technology that is relatively recent invention which needs to be taught.
People in the oral culture preserved knowledge and transmitted wisdom through mnemonics, formulae, epic narratives and other forms of information systems which favoured recall. Oral cultures didn’t have writing to store information for later retrieval therefore relied heavily on the person to memorise the content. Human mind alone has limited capacity to remember information verbatim. In oral cultures it is hard to verify two accounts are exactly the same, even if it is from the author themselves. The nature of sound in which orality is rooted is evanescent. Sound exists only when it is produced. Unlike written text, spoken words disappear as soon as they are spoken. Written text exists independently of the producer, allowing readers in the future to consume the information. Communication in oral culture required the presence of a listener, unlike written cultures where the audience is fictionalised. The producer in the oral culture communicates fluidly and interactively as the listener demands while writing distances the author from the reader.
The medium of communication shapes the cognitive process and societal structures. Writing drastically improved our analytical and abstract reasoning ability. Writing breaks us free from thought intertwined with memory systems. To solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for oral recurrence. To think through something in nonformulaic, non patterned, non-mnemonic terms, even if it were possible, would be a waste of time, for such thought, once worked through could never be recovered with any effectiveness, as it could be with the aid of writing. Providing a permanent record of information enables for more complex accumulation and synthesis of knowledge. Unlike the context and environment boundedness of orality, writing allowed for ideas to be separated from specific context. Writing also uses visual space to organize ideas, making complex thought structures visible and more easily manipulated. The use of diagrams, lists, and other visual aids in writing supports logical organization and hierarchical thinking.
The ability to store and transmit thoughts externally was a big leap in human communication.