LATE TO THE PARTY
“Made on Earth by Humans.” Elon Musk is an odd one, and full of surprises. His Tesla Roadster, launched into orbit in 2018, with Starman the mannequin at the wheel, has now completed its first lap around the sun. With the above words printed on its circuit board. This phrase is perhaps the most charming case of the overestimation of alien intelligence ever fathomed by man. To them we grant the burden of understanding that this is writing, that it carries a message, and that the message, via an alphabet, bears meanings like “to make,” “humans,” and “Earth.” Good luck. It reminds me a little of a story told by Umberto Eco about the semiotician Thomas Sebeok. In 1984, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission consulted Sebeok after depositing nuclear waste in the Nevada desert that would remain radioactive for the next ten thousand years. His task was to devise a means of communicating to future generations that they should steer clear of the area. Over the course of thousands of years, naturally, civilizations and empires rise and fall, whole populations die out—so how, then, do we communicate with the aliens, should they arrive? The semiotician scrambled for an answer, ruling out all verbal communication, electrical signals, olfactory messages, ideograms based on conventions that are entirely our own. Even pictograms were scrapped. The only solution was to create a story and keep it alive: to pass along a narrative of radioactivity’s danger, building myths and legends around it.
It’s very odd that languages are human society’s only substantial, rich, efficient, and stable code. We might have created a myriad of other systems, perhaps even universal ones. And yet language is the protagonist, the queen of interaction and conversation. It’s highly efficient when synchronic, in the moment, with both speakers present, in the form of a dialogue. An extremely well-oiled code.
Writing, the code of written language, not so much. It arrived far later. It was a slow and gradual seaquake, roiling for millennia in its various creative hotbeds, only to then flood the world, spilling over the continents. And not only did it take us lots of time, it also showed up late. “Late” is a relative expression, though if we look at the two hundred thousand years (or so) that humans have been speaking compared with the five thousand years that we’ve been writing, the time gap is substantial. Writing came late to the party, in other words, after the guests had been chatting for millennia. But why?
To answer this question, we must get a sense of how written communication works, and not only when it’s connected to writing. All codes that don’t record a specific language—like semasiography, which we looked at earlier; emblems; mnemonic systems—are extremely limited in how much information they can carry. The precursors of writing, the nameless icons and all their limitations, help guide us in understanding the obstacles that prevented writing from blossoming before the fourth millennium BCE.
The problem, perhaps, lies in just how immovable codes can be. Codes make for heavy armor, covering a body—i.e., language—that’s much the opposite: agile, dynamic, interactive, swift. Not only was writing late to arrive, it’s late to act. It moves slowly, with a broadcast delay. In a word, or rather three, it’s out of sync.
OUT OF SYNC
When it comes to inventing codes of communication, humans are excellent. More than seven thousand languages are spoken throughout the world, many of them nearing extinction, but the number is still impressive. Language (whether an innate faculty or not) is universal. Written codes are not. They’re infinitely rarer. They’re forced to be, by their own constraints.
Language is fast. Think of it like an athlete, climbing, running, jumping, moving through time and space at a dizzying speed. Writing, meanwhile, wears a heavy shell. Not only is writing slow, but it’s resistant to change, and it’s even a bit reactionary. Are you picturing the tortoise and the hare now? Well, it’s not quite like that. This time around, the hare is actually faster.
Synchronic communication (speaking to one another in the same place, in the same moment, face-to-face) obviously comes with different characteristics from written communication. Just being present constitutes a great advantage: if there’s a misunderstanding and the message doesn’t come across, you can adjust the ping-pong of words. All you have to do is interrupt the person, ask again, correct the problem: the conversation can be repaired.
Writing, being asynchronous, lacks this flexibility. Written symbols can be processed in the absence of their author. And not having the participants there renders everything more difficult. Nothing can be repaired: all that’s unclear remains unclear. And not having that ping-pong, that back-and-forth of “I didn’t understand that, can you explain,” is a real problem. Successful communication, outside of time and space, outside of the here-and-now of a direct exchange, requires a powerful medium, a code that’s precise, effective, and, above all, stable. And stability, as we know, takes time. It doesn’t come easily.
This is science speaking, not me. We’re designed for dialogue, not monologue. We’re designed to converse. Though let’s not simplify things too much. Conversation has its problems, too: it’s never linear; it can be fragmentary, elliptical. There’s no easy way to plan what you want to say since you never know what the other person will say before you; it must be appropriate for that particular audience, etc. And this all goes down without any real structure, mind you. Yet it works—precisely because it’s flexible. Try having the same conversation using a written code: not so simple, right? Which is why conversation is easy and writing much more difficult.
MAILBOX
However. I begin with a however. Because even with how unwieldy it can be, how reactionary, how slow, writing has changed each and every one of us, from within. I’m not talking about writing as a collective, distributive, or cultural revolution—the operative system of our memory or our history, whether personal or shared. Nor as a political, ideological, or religious instrument. Nor as a distinctive secret, an individual code.
I’m talking about the change that occurs in every one of us, a change rooted in our (very human) cultural evolution. Not natural, cultural. Which after more than five thousand years has clearly managed to touch our neurons. Reading has a mind-altering effect on all of us.
Brain-imaging experiments using MRI scans have shown that learning to read reconfigures our cognitive system. Seeing written signs activates large areas of the cerebral cortex, and to an even greater effect in those who are literate. The areas involved are the right occipital lobe, responsible for visual perception, and a focal area of the occipital-temporal lobe. This area has been termed the “visual word form area” (VWFA) precisely because of its active response to written words. This is the mailbox where all the words we read end up—even those you’re absorbing right now. It’s active in this very moment.
Writing is still too young, it hasn’t yet had time to alter our DNA. Nor did it create a cognitive system from scratch. The invention of writing did not reconfigure our brain’s operating system, though a revolution took place nonetheless. Our neurons learned to repurpose certain parts of the brain and use them to process signs. The areas programmed to recognize shapes and the outlines of objects were recalibrated to distinguish the shapes of written symbols. And signs, too, over the course of history, did their own adapting, not by force of a natural process but out of pure necessity, in accordance with how our brain scans the world around us, availing itself of a limited number of segments and contours. The lines we began this all with, remember?
Which is why QR codes—those little black-and-white squares that link objects to the virtual world—make perfect sense to a smartphone while our retina finds them completely undecipherable.
AFTER THE WHEEL
Let’s cut to the chase, before we start looking ahead to the future. Let’s draw a few conclusions. Even with all its flaws, its delays, its ancestral slowness, did the invention of writing truly revolutionize history? Is it, truly, the world’s greatest invention?
Don’t ask me. My confirmation bias starts flaring up even at the thought of it. Ask the people, in any country. Ask the Swedish, for example.
At the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology, in Stockholm, there’s a large room with a hundred display cases. Held in the cases are objects representing the hundred most important inventions in history. To make the selection, the museum conducted a survey of Swedish citizens (divided into cross sections of adults and children). In the Top 100 are the usual suspects, the inventions we’d all expect: the internet, the automobile, the lightbulb—along with a few other Cinderellas, like the skateboard, makeup, the padlock. A nice hodgepodge, in other words.
The inventions, like in any good classification, are ranked in order of importance. The world’s greatest, according to the adults who were surveyed, is the wheel, followed by electricity, the telephone, and the computer. For kids (between the ages of eleven and twelve) the order of “greatness” is a bit different: first comes the computer, followed by the automobile, the TV, and the cell phone.
And what about writing?
Are you ready?
Thirtieth for adults, thirty-eighth for kids. Writing sits just beneath the zipper, and well beneath—wait for it—the stove. At least it beat the vacuum cleaner.
And yet many of the inventions on this very Swedish list stand on the shoulders of the thing that’s been so woefully relegated to thirtieth place: the computer, the internet, the printing press (eighteenth!), the watch, the pen. These are tools that, without writing, would hardly be of use.
Tools. But writing isn’t a tool. For the Egyptians, the Maya, the Chinese, the Mesopotamians, writing was a daughter of the gods. For our solitary inventors, it was a revelation, a divine gift, enlightenment itself.
For us, it’s magic. And I say that unsentimentally, with science on my side. Because what you’re doing at this very moment is literally magical. And I mean “literally” literally, letter by letter. You’re reading words and sentences, without even realizing how quickly you’re doing it, how quickly you’re “processing” what’s written. And the magic here lies in your ability to enter the head of someone who’s not there with you, who isn’t speaking to you, who isn’t responding to you. Asynchrony, yes, but what a beautiful thing, this asynchrony! It’s an imperfect magic trick, since comprehension is not instantaneous—it must be pondered, interrogated, and there’s a margin of error. But it’s in this act of pondering, of “thinking it over,” that its perfection lies. It’s the silence of this dialogue that’s so revolutionary.
The wheel does no such thing, nor does electricity. Nor even the internet. Writing does it. You do it.