I woke up this morning from a dream where I was at some historical site learning about an early writing tool.
It was sort of like a tattoo gun, powered by pedal, which would drive the ink into assumedly leathern material.
(Outside, Stephen Fry was giving a lecture to the tourists in the rain.)
I think about writing a lot of the time.
Growing up, my earliest writing was done on promotional pads using promotional pens.
That is, the pads of paper were provided to Diamond’s Body Shop by various sellers of automotive parts.
They would buy pads of paper with their logo printed at the top, and they would give these as free items to the companies who bought from them.
My dad’s body shop had pens with their logo on them, which they would give freely to customers.
In short, because of the place of writing in culture, and the price of pens and paper in the economy, and because of my relationship with my dad, I had easy access to the technology.
The early writing was more like drawing (and that more like doodling), and a lot of writing my own name in cursive. (Hello, narcissism!)
It was something I did to while away time while my brother and I were at the shop — times during which my dad needed to get extra work done on Saturday.
This is very different from the writing done throughout most of human history, where paper was scarce, and modern pens weren’t even a thing.
The bulk of writing then was either accounting ledgers, contracts and decrees and, of course, the copying of religious texts.
If you wanted a copy of a text, it had to be copied ad litteram (“by the letter”) by a scribe. (The phrase “literal” comes from this phrase — it means to read a text literally by the letter — that is, to read a text word for word, grasping its literal meaning.)
What I do, this mad creative brain fart form of expression, is a luxury which was simply not possible for most people until the 19th century. Hitherto it was only available to those of a well-to-do class of educated people.
Writing now isn’t even about words at all, it’s often done with video cameras that people have on their phones. Because of the ubiquity of these cameras, there is a premium on entertainment value for one’s communications, and the audiences have grown siloed and hyper-specific.
What logo-centric writing we still have is done in places like this, where people use a software provided by silicon valley to send our curated thoughts out to friends and a few strangers.
Such a strange luxury it is, and significant.
We no longer cut down what needs to be written to the most important things.
Instead, we attempt to create importance in order to justify the communication.
It’s no wonder that we’re in such an informational mess. When one thinks about it, the tree seems over-grown, and time for a trim.
What kind of shears does a civilization use to perform such a chore?
Much, I suppose, must be done on an individual level, person-to-person, in terms of what kinds of information we concede to take on face, and what we choose to question.
In, say, the sixties, it was assumed most people would read the local paper, and then folks would accentuate this information with magazines — often tailored to suit specific subject matter.
You could read as much as you wanted, but how much of that information would be useful to you in conversation would be something that you would need to sense in terms of social etiquette.
How to act in public is something that’s also changed, and we have a spectrum of personality types who do so in different ways, assumedly varying substantially considering the company.
And topics such as politics, which it simply used to be impolite to discuss, are now impossible to discuss. One has to sift through a sandbox of garbage to find the occasional mutually-agreed-upon fact.
Still, despite all of the challenges, we are set upon a unique opportunity.
While the threat of a complete bog-down looms large, we may have already seen the worst of it, and the tools to gather and organize have also grown more agile and sophisticated.
It’ll take Ethics — Courage, Justice, Moderation, and Wisdom — to use the tools appropriately.
May I be on the side of solutions rather than trouble-making.
Attendantly, Aaron