by Bill Ives
February 4, 2009 at 9:27 pm
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
I have written on this blog and elswhere that the phonetic alphabet was the greatest ever breakthrough in information technology. Here is a great blog post, Why Text Remains King of the Web, by Steve Rubel that documents some more reasons.
Steve writes: I am starting to believe that despite all the hype around online video, text remains King of the Web. Why text? There are at least five reasons…
It’s scannable – according to Jakob Nielsen users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average site visit and 20% is more likely
Three letters: SEO – For all that Google Universal Search has done to elevate video, search results are still largely made up of text and everyone wants better SEO
The workplace – It’s much easier for cube-based workers to read text on the screen and get away with it vs. watching long videos. Watching videos (even work related vids) screams “slacker”
Mobile Devices – Yes, of course you can put a video on an iPhone. But it’s work and requires planning. Text is easier to pull up in a nanosecond╩╩
Distribution – Nothing flies like text. It’s so easy to cut and paste it and send it somewhere or to clip and re-syndicate it via email, RSS or social networks
I don’t know about you but I love text.
Thanks Steve. I do too. I agree with all his points. I often get links to videos but I do not play them because the audio would bother others around me so I save them for later, and sometimes forget about them. However, I can silently read text as soon as I get it. This possibility was not always considered, as we shall see below.
Now the ancient Greeks who came up with the phonetic alphabet probably did not think about these implications. It is the invention that keeps on giving. As I wrote in Deloitte Declares We Are in a Media Democracy, the concept of an original version that could be preserved did not evolve until after written text. This was critical to the development of modern science among other things. In many ways, the epic poets, chief knowledge distributors of their day, made up the details as they went along. Text made available a visual record of thought, abolishing the need for an acoustic record and hence the need for rhythms. The first thing put into text was an epic poem but soon text inspired documents appeared. But there is more.
Like many great inventions, the uses of text slowly evolved. In fact, it appears that reading was often done aloud until after the 6th century. Ivan Illich relates that St. Augustine refrained from reading after his brothers went to sleep for fear of waking them. After the 6th century, silent reading became more commonplace, and such techniques such as tables of contents and indexes first appeared over a thousand years after the phonetic alphabet first emerged. . These new devices allowed for random access to text information, a concept we take for granted now. Now people were free to read their emails and blog posts without disturbing their neighbors. What will be next for text?
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I also agree .. text won't be disappearing any time soon 
I was interested to see your reference to Ivan Illich and his consideration of the history of the alphabet. Illich actually thought of the alphabet as not merely the most important information technology in history but one of the most important technologies, or tools, of all. And he was quite concerned with how this tool, like others, shaped its users.
As you point out, Illich describes in his book The Vineyard of the Text how the written alphabet helped to usher in such structures as indices, tables of contents, and even the isolated word itself. Speech tends to be a continuous stream of sound, and without a method for fixing thoughts and speech to paper, it is quite difficult to consider one word in comparison to another. Anyone interested in this subject will do well to look at Orality & Literacy, by Walter J. Ong – a book that Illich often recommended to his listeners.
While the Vineyard book certainly focuses on a small period in the history of reading, as reading transformed from an oral practice to a silent, more contemplative practice, the text actually leaving the page to be independent of its oral interpretation, Illich's argument is more expansive. He is mainly interested in how our tools shape our conception of the word and of our selves.
Reading as we have come to know and practice it was shaped by the use of the phonetic alphabet. Moreover, this same alphabet and the textual structures and the literacy it helped make possible radically changed human consciousness. They reshaped the mental landscape, as Illich calls it, and made possible the modern individual. And, Illich argues, it reshape the landscape even for the vast majority of people who could not, themselves, actually read. Even those without reading skills thought of "turning a page" in their lives, for example, or prepared for judgement at Heaven's door by a guy with a big book in front of him. And so forth. In short, the traditional book became a root metaphor of the Western self, having effects far beyond its immediate users, as we would say. And Illich sees this reshaping of consciousness and self well evident well before the arrival of Gutenberg and his printing press.
Illich goes further, however. He shows that just as modern reading and the bookish self came into being at a certain moment in history, shaped by certain technologies such as the alphabet, they are now giving way – giving way to the screen, which is his shorthand for today's array of electronic information technologies. And so, he argues, as traditional reading disappears, so will the modern self, which is of great concern to him.
Indeed, he perceives a "chasm" existing between oral culture and literate, bookish culture, with neither side able to truly grasp how the other thinks and conceives of the world. And now, he sees opening up a similarly unbridgeable chasm between literate culture, in which the book dominated, and whatever it is that the Web and the computer and scree will bring into being. And what worries him is that on the far side of this chasm, man (and woman) will, once again, be reshaped. How, exactly, is unknowable.
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PhilFebruary 24th, 2009 at 7:15 pm |
I came to this page from Google, pressed Ctrl-f and typed in the words I was interested in and pressed enter, it immediately took me to the bit I was interested in (I have since paged up and scanned more of the content).
You need to be able to filter to use the internet efficiently, I've sat and watched videos for 10 minutes and they never told me what I wanted to know but I didn't realise that until I'd watched it all, with tet you can scan much more quickly. Also, people who make videos are all starting to add their little "intros" to each video so you get an annoying 20 second interlude at the start of each video.
Even if I read the full content I read much faster than people talk and there's nothing worse than <<<<buffering>>>>…
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