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How do we transmit culture when it cannot be put into words? | Aeon Essays
Until the last tick of history’s clock, cultural transmission meant oral transmission, and poetry, passed from mouth to ear, was the principle medium of moving information across space and from one generation to the next.
Joshua Foer • Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
While writing would allow far more knowledge to be preserved and accessed, it would also relieve individuals of the burden of sustaining collective memory themselves. Like writing and print, our use of digital media ordinarily generates an archive (as well as a trail of data, often invisible to users but of great value to others). But although digi... See more
L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City
Sometimes online communities make wikis or YouTube explainers to keep track of certain storylines, but many seem to persist without ever being recorded. Shared memory is often maintained in ways that don’t translate to the readable archives produced by print-based textual tradition. On some level, this feels paradoxical, like the internet should ac... See more
Libby Marrs • How to Read the Internet
sari added
Writing allowed for the durable storage of knowledge independently of human beings. Not only can written knowledge outlive a particular individual, it can outlive a whole culture.
L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City
The culture may transform itself in response to changes in its environment or through interaction with neighbouring cultures. But cultures also undergo transitions due to their own internal dynamics.
Yuval Noah Harari • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
"Civilizations with long nows look after things better," says Brian Eno. "In those places you feel a very strong but flexible structure which is built to absorb shocks and in fact incorporate them."1 You can imagine how such a process could evolve—all civilizations suffer shocks; only the ones that absorb the shocks survive. That still doesn't expl... See more
Stewart Brand • Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning
Andrei Stoica added
It must be close to impossible for indigenous cultures to convey their knowledge to us literates because we ask for it in the way we would write it down, in neat linear sequences. That is not how they know their stories.
Lynne Kelly • The Memory Code: The traditional Aboriginal memory technique that unlocks the secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and ancient monuments the world over
Further, you should never commit all of your cultural knowledge to a print or digital repository.