Invitations and Becomings

On Tuesday, I attended my first UX Bookclub event. (If you've never heard of this bookclub, details are on their wiki.) We discussed Alex Wright's Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, which offers a whirlwind tour through the history of information technologies from ice-age totems via Irish illuminated manuscripts to Linnaeus' classification system and the web.

It's a fascinating book, and I'm sure I'll refer to it here more than once. But today I want to focus on a distinction that comes up in a number of places that sparked considerable discussion by our group. That was the distinction between oral and written cultures.

Orality vs Literacy

Wright's book is as much a history of writing as it is a history of information technology. However, and to his credit, this is a bias that Wright goes to some effort to make explicit. He is clearly inspired by Walter Ong's claim that European culture has consistently devalued orality, to the extent that we understand very little about the way oral tradition preserve or refine information.*

The Epigenetics of Modern Taxonomies

In his phone conversation with our bookclub, Wright points out that in writing the book, he found himself going further and further back in time to trace the roots of our contemporary view of information. The important point here is that it turned out not to be possible to simply start from the invention of the printing press or even writing, that is, to separate our written culture from oral culture it is built upon.

As a result, one of the hallmarks of the book is Wright's emphasis on the oral tradition that underlies the classification systems associated with European civilisation: Aristotle's Great Chain of Being, and Linnaeus' Biological Classification System being the most famous examples. Wright undermines the idea that either of these sprung from the forehead of their creators like Athena from Zeus. Instead, he shows how each of these follows the same pattern exhibited by folk taxonomies around the world. Taxonomies that thrive all seem to be only five or six levels deep and are centred on a level that corresponds to the "real" or familiar names of things. Aristotle's invention of binomial classification itself conforms to this tradition by using the real name as the basis for the genus.

Wright suggests that there is an epigenetic basis to the success of a certain form of taxonomy (a meta-structure for meta-data, you might say), and points to the prototype theory of Eleanor Rosch as an early attempt to make these epigenetic structures explicit.

Orality and Symbolism

There's a strong association in Glut between orality and the use of symbols, vs literacy and the use of language (in the usual sense). Symbols are introduced in terms of the ability to extend a network of communication between the family or tribal-unit. Symbols enable relations to be tracked among a much bigger group of people, allowing relations between people who have never met. (Which reminds me of both Alphonso Lingis' idea of a Community-of-those-with-nothing-in-common - though that might be an erroneous link - and Mark Pesce's talk at Web Directions 2008 about the need for a technology to push us beyond the Dunbar number.)

One of the most interesting suggestions in the book has to do with the impact of the introduction of mass-literacy into a civilisation that is founded on oral traditions and symbolism. Wright sees this in the wars of the Reformation. Martin Luther's posting of his 95 theses to a church door constitutes the injection of a written tradition into the oral culture of the Roman Catholic Church, with its profound emphasis on symbolism. This has, Wright argues (I've forgotten who he quotes here... anyone?), the effect of inducing a kind of mass psychosis, as people fail to deal with these competing forms of parsing information.

While he doesn't make it explicit, the resonates in the context of the final section of the book, where Wright discusses the invention of hypertext by Ted Nelson, and especially Nelson's ire at what he sees as the mutilation of his idea at the hands of a "priesthood" of technocrats (sorry, developer-friend, I think he has you in mind). I can't help wondering whether a similar sort of psychotic break might be on the horizon, with the return to a kind of second-orality (that's Ong again), in the form of YouTube, and the potentially extreme non-linearity of the web.

Some further reading/listening I might do on this:

The End of the Age of Literacy - by Walter Ong - available as a transcript PDF or in its original form as a lecture (somehow listening to the lecture seems more appropriate, don't you think?)

Geeks Bearing Gifts - by Ted Nelson - the chapter summary, at least

If you have other suggestions, please let me know. - Justin

* Interesting fact: Walter Ong studied for his Masters with Marshall McLuhan.