How difficult did you find it to learn to read as a child?
I remember my Mum spending hours with me as she tried to help me learn to read, as it was something I found difficult, and I am so grateful to her for that help. While some of us found learning to read easier than others, it is something every one of us who can read has had to learn.
Compare this to learning to speak, which comes naturally to us in childhood. Why is there such a difference? It suggests that we evolved to speak, while reading and writing are technology.
I never thought of reading and writing as a technology until after I had started writing this blog, but why do I think that it is a technology now? Why don’t we start by exploring what we mean by technology?
What is technology?
I would define technology as something which fulfils our purpose. That can be a physical technology, often known as hardware, such as the mobile phone in your pocket. Or an abstract idea and system, such as money. Or a combination of the two, such as a book.
The physical part is the book itself, which contains the written word. That written word is in itself abstract, designed to represent human language. The written word, and the ability to read and understand it, is a human made system and is therefore a technology.
Writing has been invented on at least four separate occasions in our history, by the following civilisations.
- Mesopotamians sometime between 3400 BC and 3300 BC
- Egypt around 3200 BC
- China sometime between 900 BC and 600 BC
- Mesoamerica, which was made up of a number of cultures in southern Mexico and Costa Rica
Proto writing, from which writing would have evolved, is typically pictographic or ideographic, representing a specific object or concept, which means it has limited scope. Modern examples of this would be emojis, traffic signs and mathematical systems.
A full writing system, by contrast, allows the whole language to be represented in its written form. It’s incredible when you think about it: the English alphabet is made up of 26 symbols, and they can represent our spoken language in full.
Writing was invented by accountants, not poets
Writing, it appears, was originally developed for record keeping, such as the size of a harvest, and this kind of makes sense, as writing breaks the data processing limitation of the human mind. The size of our working memory is likely the same now as it was in Mesopotamia some five thousand years ago, and that is 7 items plus or minus 2.
Acting as a memory tool isn’t the only benefit of the data storage and processing brought about by the invention of reading and writing. You can also share information and knowledge through space and time. Take this blog post: you could be reading it anywhere on the planet at any time after I publish it. This always blows my mind when I think of it.
But it didn’t take long for fictional writing to appear. The first known literary masterpiece was written by the Mesopotamians, and it is a story where the hero uses technology, but the use of this technology has downsides, such as the destruction of the environment. The underlying plot could be used today.
The proof: it has to be taught, every single time
Humanity is built on a lineage of technology. Our ancestors were using flint tools in Olduvai in Tanzania some 1.7 million years ago, before our own species had even evolved, and as they were technology our ancestors would have learnt how to build and use them.
Writing, in comparison, is a very recent technology, being only some five and a half thousand years old, and just like flint tools we need to learn how to use it. Each generation has to teach the next generation to read.
Where would you rank the invention of writing in comparison with all other technological inventions? I think it is the most important one. Find out why in next week’s post.
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Further reading
- W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: A book which explores the nature of technology and if it evolves
- The British Library, Where Did Writing Begin
- Louise Pryke, ChatGPT Is Confronting, but Humans Have Always Adapted to New Technology – Ask the Mesopotamians, Who Invented Writing