A fraught question, eh? :)
Here's one opinion - a particularly thought-provoking one given the
medium we're using to discuss it.
Udhay
http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/tom-standage/writing-greatest-invention
WRITING IS THE GREATEST INVENTION
Tom Standage argues that writing, which allows ideas to travel across
space and time, has done the most for human progress ...
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, January/February 2012
The greatest invention of all must surely be writing. It is not just one
of the foundations of civilisation: it underpins the steady accumulation
of intellectual achievement. By capturing ideas in physical form, it
allows them to travel across space and time without distortion, and thus
slip the bonds of human memory and oral transmission, not to mention the
whims of tyrants and the vicissitudes of history.
Its origins are prosaic: it was invented by accountants, not poets, in
the 4th millennium BC, as a spur of the counting system with which
farming societies kept track of agricultural goods. At first
transactions were recorded by storing groups of shaped clay tokens –
representing wheat, cattle or textiles – in clay envelopes. But why use
tokens when pressing one into a tablet of wet clay would do instead?
These impressions, in turn, were superseded by symbols scratched or
punched into the clay with a stylus. Tokens had given way to writing.
As human settlements swelled from villages to the first cities, writing
was needed for administrative reasons. But it quickly became more
flexible and expressive, capable of capturing the subtleties of human
thought, not just lists of rations doled out or kings long dead. And
this allowed philosophers, poets and chroniclers to situate their ideas
in relation to those of previous thinkers, to argue about them and
elaborate upon them. Each generation could build on the ideas of its
forebears, making it possible for there to be species-wide progress in
philosophy, commerce, science and literature.
The amazing thing about writing, given how complicated its early systems
were, is that anyone learned it at all. The reason they did is revealed
in the ancient Egyptian scribal-training texts, which emphasise the
superiority of being a scribe over all other career choices, with titles
like “Do Not Be Soldier, Priest or Baker”, “Do Not Be a Husbandman” and
“Do Not Be a Charioteer”. This last text begins: “Set thine heart on
being a scribe, that thou mayest direct the whole earth.” The earliest
scribes understood that literacy was power – a power that now extends to
most of humanity, and has done more for human progress than any other
invention.
Tom Standage is digital editor of The Economist
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((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
