The Written Word
At first, most of humankind's ideas and stories were fleeting, bound to voices and memories as impermanent as the wind. With writing they solidified. And with paper, they became immutable objects capable of travelling through time. The medium, especially in its modern form, revolutionized knowledge, art, and the sciences. It liberated thoughts by... See more
Patrick La Roque • The chair and the Aqua-Lung — laROQUE | photographer.photographe
For most of our human history, storytelling was oral. Myths were spoken or sung by diverse storytellers who could select and modulate their narrative to best suit a given audience, emphasizing some aspects and ignoring others.
Sally Mallam • The Oral Tale
Scribal 500BC to 1550:
Literacy – even when only for social elites – transformed the oral paradigm. Plato's Socrates stood at the transition between the Oral and Scribal paradigms. In the Phaedrus dialogue, Socrates recounts how the Pharaoh explained to Thoth that this invention would destroy our “memory” – pointing towards the fundamental
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