The digital environment is profoundly changing the way we write. Fewer rules, more reflexes: writing is becoming fast, spontaneous, often dictated by voice or copied and pasted. A new chapter in a story that began over 5,000 years ago.
Writing was born under the sign of economy and memory (pastoral accounting, recording of debts). Around 3200 BC, in Sumer, written symbols took on an appearance close to abstract convention (this is the so-called cuneiform writing) but the crucial stage in the evolution of writing systems appeared among the Greeks at the end of the second millennium BC . This is the alphabetic system.
Consonant symbols from a Semitic alphabet were blended with the Greek language to create vowels. This innovation had immense influence, as the Romans later borrowed the Greek alphabet to create the one we use here.
From clay slabs to modern tablets
Writings made the presence of the memory holder superfluous and then moved towards abstraction to also represent ideas. In the Middle Ages, the invention of punctuation contributed to the more precise division of thought , but a word must also be said about the importance of the support. Observing Mesopotamian tablets, we notice that they were clay slabs that could be held in the hand.
The interest of the modern, digital tablet is similar: it favors the portability of the object. With papyrus appeared the possibility of manufacturing scrolls that still only revealed part of the text at a time, as today on a computer screen when we have to “scroll” the screen. Parchment, a foldable and solid page made of animal skin, then demonstrated the superiority of the codex (several pages of parchment sewn together) and the codex became the most widespread type of book.
The codex reader could move from one page to another, obtaining an instant overall impression. The codex could also be hidden under clothing and participate in the dissemination of forbidden texts .
Silent reading and dematerialization
The most popular book forms were always those that made it easy to hold. The book that fit in the hand became the reader’s private property. After Gutenberg, the printing press enabled rapid and massive book production, promoting individual reading.
Likewise, the written text as such, and no longer just the book-object, became the property of the reader in the sense that it was then common to read silently.
In silence, an unlimited relationship could be established with words, which no longer occupied the time necessary to pronounce them and existed in an inner space allowing comparisons, increasing the power of the mind.
In all this, we notice a process of dematerialization and distancing from spoken language that continued even later. As early as the end of the 19th century , it was discovered that the left cerebral hemisphere constitutes the part used by the brain for coding and decoding functions.
Multiply memory
For language, coding is writing and decoding is reading. We would therefore be able to read before knowing how to read. However, Plato claims that knowledge is present in us before the perception of the object: we discover a word because something pre-exists it in the world of Ideas. This statement illustrates a distrust of writing. In the Phaedrus , Socrates declares that written words only remind us of what we already know .
Yet, with writing, an objective language was emancipated from an invisible language and from the voice. This silencing, correlative to an increase in the spirit, is fundamental for the human species. They multiplied the possibilities of memory against disappearance, oblivion, and death. This memory has fostered knowledge of the world and ourselves as much as material wealth.
Netocracy sets the rules
Now we can see that the amount of information on the Internet, impossible to control individually, makes it more necessary every day to prioritize data that depends on our ability to interpret and classify it according to specific goals. An information “netocracy” has thus emerged , a category of people who derive their power from a comparative advantage in technological knowledge and the networking of their skills. The netocracy is part of a new balance of power.
Consider “alternative truths” , “fake news”, “trolls” and sometimes state attempts to digitally influence public opinion.
Copy and paste rather than create
The idea also appears among the avant-gardes of creation that it is no longer necessary to create texts ex nihilo but to know how to transfer available texts. This is the question of copy and paste. In Writing Without Writing , the avant-garde theorist Kenneth Goldsmith argues that the renewal of writing made necessary by digital technology must be done by the appropriation of existing texts, rearranged or even plagiarized, in a sort of extension of the now common gesture of copy and paste. The notion of author and property is brought into play.
This gesture of infinite regression in the use of texts and sources, however, goes against the Aristotelian principle according to which one must, somewhere, stop and everything has a first cause. On the contrary, the regression towards the origin must be infinite.
The question posed is ultimately to determine where the origin of the creative act lies. There would therefore never be a basis and always a more distant cause to seek, whether it be tacit or unconscious, which technology makes easier to verify every day.
More impulses
Writing is therefore less linked to the authenticity of content than to its production process. It is moving towards practices increasingly linked to a discharge of impulses – today we make purchases by speaking only on our phones, enacting the cancellation of writing for commercial transactions. It is returning to orality and to an insurrection of the body in writing: an emoticon is the silent expression of an affect, the multiplication of exclamation points reiterates the signs of an affect and “voice recognition” makes it possible to do away with writing.
Contemporary writers can therefore be divided into two classes: one is akin to a consumer proletariat whose desires are fragmented, created or provoked by the other class, the netocracy, thanks to advertising for example, in all the subtle forms that it can take. The horizon of lexicon, syntax, punctuation and grammar then recedes in favor of an instinctual satisfaction linked to the enjoyment of the technological medium.
Those who belong to the first class therefore have an understanding of the world limited to what others are willing to provide them, who are capable of hierarchizing (decoding) information and producing meaning (coding) which corresponds to their values.
Author Bio: Pierre Jamet is a University Professor at the University of Franche-Comté
Tags: Digital writing
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