[http://metaphoricalweb.ning.com/profiles/blogs/future-proof-from-word-of]
We are a talkative species.

If you take a look at the bulk of inventions produced in the last
10,000 years, they fall into four broad swaths - better ways to move
things (and ourselves), better ways to protect ourselves, better ways
to feed ourselves, and better ways to communicate with one another.
Communication with one another is such a strong imperative that one of
the harshest punishments that we can inflict on people is to deprive
them of that communication - to put them in solitary confinement, to
exile them to the wilderness, to "ex-communicate" them. In many
primitive cultures, should a person commit manslaughter or some similar
crime and get caught, they became "dead" - not killed in retaliation,
but made a non-person that others were not permitted to acknowledge or
speak to.

Because of that importance, how we communicate is a very significant
thread for the future analyst to watch. The predominant communication
channels that a culture uses will dictate its organizational structure,
more so than any other factor. In hunter-gatherer societies,
communication (beyond one-to-one local communication) is typically done
communally, within groups. For formal communications - when decisions
need to be made, for instance, or in the recitation of (and addition
to) a community's memory structure - the role of speaker was typically
formalized - the speaker was the one who held a given totem, or given
the floor. Communication range was also limited to the speed at which a
man or woman could walk or run.

Additionally, these early cultures typically made use of a living long
term memory, usually via an oral "song" that kept intact the important
stories, historical figures, legends, and constraints of the group. One
of the fascinating things that neurologists have recently discovered is
that musical memories are stored in a very different way than spoken
memories are in the brain, and that such memories are typically
retained much longer and with better fidelity (in great part because
these memories are actually retained in the hippocampus and cerebrum
rather than the cerebellum). Kinesthetic memories similarly tend to be
retained far better as well. This may be why most people within these
cultures were taught oral history as a combination of chant and dance -
the body actually "remembers" this information at a deeper level than
it retains speech.

Nomadic cultures made an important discovery - horses not only made for
good food, but if you could manage to sneak up on a horse, it was
possible to actually ride it. At first such rides were probably just
short enough to put a spear in it, but after a while some genius
realized that if they could actually control horses, they could go far
faster than they could on foot. Beyond the obvious advantages from a
food hunting perspective, one additional advantage was that horse-borne
messengers could communicate far more effectively with people at
greater distances. This made it possible to coordinate actions, and was
in fact one of the first instances of hierarchical military structures
- a warlord with one force could communicate effectively with
additional forces under his captains, who could in turn coordinate
their forces with lieutenants.

Agrarian communities developed a somewhat more defensive structure,
designed primarily to keep these same nomadic cultures out. but also
because the communication requirements of agriculture are broader.
Farming is a chancy business - you're forced into defending a turf of
land - running away isn't really an option unless you were willing to
starve - so you needed to have ways of coordinating the troops (again,
a hierarchical structure). However, you also needed to manage
inventories, to determine how much of a given crop you needed to
replant as seed, to set prices on the grains and other goods, and,
ultimately how much to tax people for the services in order to make all
of this possible.

As discussed in an earlier column, what this amounted to was the
process of shifting abstraction levels. This can be seen in mythology.
Tribal mythologies are very animistic - every grove, brook, wind and
cave had its attendant spirit, but for the most part, those spirits
simply existed - you acknowledged their existence and occasionally
bribed them in order to insure success in your ventures, but there was
little in the way of hierarchy.

Most agrarian societies, on the other hand, very quickly established
hierarchical models - supreme gods, and then secondary and tertiary
gods - that reflected the growing power of centralization in human
hierarchies. The warlord became the god incarnate, and power became
concentrated in bureaucracies - priestly castes, military castes,
merchant castes.

It's perhaps not thus surprising that writing only came about with this
shift in complexity; tribal societies have no need for writing, but
agrarian ones have a large number of such needs. The emergence of
writing was a radical change in human society - first because it meant
that humans didn't need to expend as much of their thought processes on
rote memorization, and likely for the first time could start thinking
about information in a way that wasn't tied specifically with a
generational oral record.

Indeed, one interesting speculation about this is that "spoken"
language may actually only have emerged about the time that writing
began, and that most languages prior to that were likely sung rather
than spoken. One possible indication of this is to look at those
cultures in the last hundred years where there was no formal written
language and compare what happens before and after they are exposed to
writing. Typically, children from these cultures who are then exposed
growing up with writing tend to have far worse rote verbal memorization
capability, though they have far better analytic ability.

It's worth noting that reading and writing also cause a significant
change in the communication structures of a society. Writing is an
asynchronous operation - information placed in writing does not need
the speaker of the information - you could write "letters" that allowed
(slow) communication between people who were not geographically close.

Additionally, and more subtly, it becomes possible to scan written
information in a way that's simply not possible with speech. This in
turn let to breaking blocks of narrative into smaller, more digestable
portions, a process that almost invariably occurs as new media emerge.
The earliest written narratives were literally epic in scale - they
represented a story that might be told over several hours in an
evening, because they were almost certainly based upon earlier oral
stories. However, as writing became more sophisticated, it began to
develop a recursive hierarchical structure of its own as people began
to master the nuances of committing symbolic representations of meaning
to a physical medium.

Most early literate cultures developed a "bible" of some sort, a
written work usually attributed to divine provenance, that encoded the
mythos (the legends, accepted history, genealogies and so forth) and
ethos (the ethical rules or laws of that people that described what was
acceptable and unacceptable within the society) of that culture. The
Hebrew Torah, the Islamic Talmud, the Christian Old and New Testaments,
the Hindu Mahabharita and Ramayana, all of these "books" emerged in
cultures that had established active literary traditions, and more had
them long enough to accumulate a body of related "subordinate books".
Indeed, by some estimates the "Bible" alone represents the political
and cultural selection of between 80 and 110 different books, depending
upon the particular sub-branch of Christianity or Judaism, with another
few dozen books that were in one version or another over the years but
have been dropped.

Cultures of the Book illustrate how powerful the advent of writing was.
With a single cultural canon, mores and ethics can be established
independent of geography. For instance, the Old Testament represents
the ethos and history of a desert-based culture. Desert cultures are
typified by a nomadic existence, a male-dominated society where women
were usually treated as chattel, a strong sense of hierarchy, a low
premium placed on the value of human life, and a very competitive
warrior ethos. Even the New Testament, which may have been influenced
by the Dionysian Mysteries so prevalent in Asia Minor as the time, is
still filtered through this desert culture filter.

Yet because of the "authority" that the book has compared to more
transient oral traditions, Christianity was carried all the way to the
wilds of Northern Europe, England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, which
previously had a forest culture structure - far more gender equality
and egalitarianism, strong oral traditions but only very crude literary
ones, a far higher sanctity of life, a much stronger clan or family
basis, and so on. It's perhaps not surprising that so many of the
heresies that the Catholic Church eventually had to stamp out come
mostly from the north as a consequence, as there was a certain cultural
schizophrenia that occurred as a fairly alien cultural outlook became
overlaid upon a very different foundation.

The migration of book production to the north also brought about the
next major evolution in communication - the shift from papyrus based
scrolls to vellum-based books. Papyrus came from desert reeds, and
thus, over time, became increasingly brittle - and usually could
support only a minimal amount of pressure before it crumbled - thus
papyrus scrolled around two rods, casette-tape style, was the most
effective way to store it.

Vellum, on the other hand, was made from lambskin, which was far more
plentiful in the north. Because of the curing process, vellum was
remarkably resistent to fading or crumbling (indeed, many vellum books
survive to the present day in very good condition. However, lambskin
was, by its very nature, much more limited in dimension, which
eventually led to using vellum leaves that were originally stacked
together, then later sewn together, into a new arranged where the
content was displayed in pages.

The introduction of new communication channels are quite frequently
accompanied by significant upheavals in cultures, especially if the new
channels are markedly superior to the old. The first Western printed
work was the Gutenberg bible, produced in 1439. Printing was quickly
picked up and improved by Italian Aldus Manutius in the mid 1450s, and
in England by William Caxton and others in the 1470s.

One of Caxton's most significant innovation was actually a cost-saving
measure - rather than a printer using a single folio page for a book
(which resulted in very large books), he subdivided the folio page into
quartos (quarters), and figured out how to orient the page so that such
quartos could be more efficiently printed and bound. This essentially
meant that you could produce four times as many "books" with the same
effort, and it also represented the shift to the first truly portable
book since the innovation of the scroll, which had the effect of
lighting a fire under the nascent publishing industry.

This technology change was likely one of the major factors of the
Reformation and the rise of Protestantism. Prior to this period, most
bibles were owned only by churches or the very wealthy/powerful. With
Caxton books (and a subsequent shift away from expensive vellum to
cheaper cloth and wood pulp pages), bibles (and many other books) now
moved into the realm of being affordable (albeit still expensive) for
the average middle-class burgher or shop-keeper.

Martin Luther's innovation (and its worthwhile understanding that it
was an innovation) was to translate the contents of these bibles from
Ecclesiastical Latin into contemporary German. This has the immediate
effect of letting ordinary people understand and interpret what had
been, up until then, what had only been disseminated by priests and
clergy. In modern parlance, Luther disintermediated the priests. This
had the fairly immediate effect of subverting the legitimacy of the
Catholic Church (especially in the North), and the rise of a new class
of priesthood who adapted to the new technologies by shifting from the
role of arbiters to the role of guides and interpreters.

Of course, the established order did not go quietly into that good
night - it seldom does. Once a given communication channel stabilizes,
a social order will tend to evolve around that communication channel,
to become invested in it. This is especially true in those situations
where the communication system is hierarchical and it meshes with a
hierarchical mindset. Once you introduce a technology that had
previously been available only to the gate keepers to everyone else -
whether affordable books in the language that people spoke or low-cost
publishing systems that bypass the established news providers, then the
value of the existing services plummet, while those that master the
production within the new media are able to establish new value
measures.

What's more, invariably the first uses of a new medium are to recreate
the dominant pattern of the old. The vast majority of all of the new
works produced during the mid-15th century were bibles. Of course, this
undermined the scriptora throughout Europe - a single bible might take
a team of monks the better part of a decade to create, whereas while it
may take only a few months to set and print a bible using a press, and
once one bible was printed, dozens more could be printed until the
first wooden type blocks wore out. Once people began experimenting with
molten lead dies, this meant that hundreds of such books could be
created.

Yet the real changes - the truly political ones, came as printers began
to realize that while the demand for Latin bibles was high, it wasn't
infinite, and eventually they began to turn to examine other uses. The
translation of bibles into contemporary languages (the vulgate, or
common, versions) became an act of defiance of the existing religious
establishment - as well as a means of controlling the message by local
kings and rulers trying to break the stranglehold that churches had
held on their lands for years.

It also meant that other books were soon also published. Histories,
books of poetry, philosophical tracts, and similar works emerged around
this time, as the medium made such works economical to produce, and in
so doing laid the groundwork for the birth of most forms of
contemporary literature. In many ways, publishing in the period from
1470 to about the 1530 or so was as dynamic a period of time for
innovation as the Internet would be five hundred years later. By the
end of this period, the Reformation would be sweeping Northern Europe
just as the Renaissance was sweeping southern Europe. The church,
seemingly dominant and invincible in 1450, would be torn by strife and
dissension as a thousand year old empire disintegrated.

There are a number of lessons to be learned here. Changing
communication channels can have huge impacts upon society, something
that we're only just really beginning to face today. It is a mistake to
see the world of 2020 as being much like today, because the very
structures that formed the foundation of the last couple of centuries
is now being torn asunder in very much the same way. More on this in
the second part of this blog post.

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Posted By Kurt Cagle to Metaphorical Web at 5/07/2009 10:00:00 AM

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