On the Technology of the Alphabet on the screen
Tell me, Euthydemus, what kind of goodness
do you want to get by collecting these books?
We receive our education at school, on the monitor of a personal computer or the screen of a tv. We used to learn, and we still do, from books, at school or at home: libraries are architectural wonders.
We are experiencing a shift from the “culture of the book” to the “culture of the screen”, a shift that is more apparent to the older generations. The old world is waning, and a new world is emerging: but that is all that happens, all the time.
The average Athenian citizen of the fifth century educated himself about his heritage through celebrations and rites, and by attending the theater. He learned about the current state of affairs in the comedies and his ancestry in the tragedies. Written texts were present, but not as common.
It was only with the beginning of the mass production of books in the medieval times that reading started to become a universal exercise. The fascination of oral myths gave way to the might of the written text. The book itself as we know it, was just a recent invention: a reading tool that, while still containing a text, was very much different from the scrolls that were used in antiquity.
Scrolls, books and screen have all in the common the alphabet, algebra and numbers: their content has not changed, apparently. We are still the alphabetical culture.
It is easy to see how the different tools change the way we interact with content. For example, we can see that browsing a book is different than browsing on a screen, and it’s clear how text and images can be manipulated across the different devices.
What is less apparent, but not less relevant, is how the different reading experiences affect the development of knowledge acquisition and ultimately cultural spread in the community. The tools don’t simply cater the content, they affect its quality: they are themselves content.
Tools in general, which can be defined as the productive means of that specific technological-animal which we call “human”, are the active background in the education and formation of culture. They produce innovation and tradition, future and ancestry: the mind is the evolutionary product of knowledge at work.
When we learn then, we experience our own living practice while we are at it.
Including this.
And this is why AkriGames is a cultural project.
How is the culture of the screen shaping our knowledge then? How will it shape it in the future? These are the questions that always arise when this topic is brought up. But they are the wrong questions: because they are themselves a product of this new “already-shaped” knowledge, an effect of the tools that they pretend to talk about. They are not original or innocent questions, by any means.
A few more on this subject.
The greatest writer of the European civilization, Plato, did not deem writing and written texts being the best means for the transmission of knowledge (and thus the formation of wise men). The true doctrine had to be heard from his voice (from his soul), like he had heard it from his mentor.
In a way that was literally inconceivable for him though, it was by writing his works that he ultimately built this cultural posture that we call Philosophy.
Now, we need to examine a further more this ambiguity.
It is very important not to stop just at the empirical side of the paradox, namely the condemnation of writing expressed by means of writing, but to investigate the foundational value that such living practice has had.
Thus, the foundational value of a living practice is: what empirical (ethical) effects does it produces. In the case of writing, by its cultural spread. To make an example: the moon that we observe with naked eye and the moon we see through a telescope: are they the same object?
Thus, not only had Plato been able, unknowingly, to build the European civilization as we know it only by means of writing. It was because of writing that he was able to think the way he was thinking.
Notes
The title is a tribute to Carlo Sini, whose ethical exercise makes me become who I am everyday.