Telling the story

Context of Communication

This web site uses state-of-the-art electronic media to pass on facts, opinions, and ideas. This is a process that will have gone on since humans first evolved the means of communicating with one-another but it is fascinating to quickly re-visit the way that that our means of communicating information has changed over time. 

The skill of manipulating the symbols we use to communicate – the ways that we understand and explain the world – we call ‘literacy’. The sophistication of the symbol systems we use, and the technology we use to produce and consume information, have become more complex over time, so that the meaning of ‘literacy’ has also become more complicated over time.

For simple practical purposes we treat this historical process as an additive tradition of information processing that has passed, historically, from speaking and oral tradition (Natura), to reading and writing (Agraria), to printing (Industria), and then to today’s information-rich audio-visual media (Informatia). ^[1]

Collective learning

During the current phase of Informatia  the momentum of social change continues to accelerate as the era of the book draws to a close and communication becomes increasingly based on digital (electronic) media.

Through the 19th century academic disciplines proliferated, and collective learning accelerated. Specialization created experts within narrow fields as the number of broadly educated people became fewer. Today, anyone with access to the internet can not only learn from the world’s smartest specialists, but also draw on carefully synthesized summaries of entire branches of knowledge. The internet has made it possible, once again, for one person to possess an overview of the entire field of human knowledge.

Much of the content on this web site examines historical information and now is the time to quickly outline the way this historical information has been passed down the generations – the increasing complexity of media that humans have used to convey their messages.

The spoken word

For much of human history, during Natura, tribal knowledge and wisdom was passed down the generations as an oral tradition of storytelling and demonstration.

At eighteen months most children can speak about 50 words and understand about 200-250. By the age of two, average vocabulary exceeds 200 words, at age 4 we know about 5,000 words, and at age 8 around 10,000. Older than this and it is difficult to predict. By the age of 8 or 9 simple word definitions can be given but only teenagers can provide acceptable critical definitions.

Arranged by numbers of speakers the five most popular languages are: Mandarin (14.4%), Spanish (6.2%), English (5.4%), Hindi (4.7%), and Arabic (4.4%) – the languages most widely taught in schools. About 10,000 years is sufficient time for all words in a language to be replaced or changed beyond recognition. Of the approximately 230 European languages, only about 100 are widely spoken, about half of these occurring in Western Europe. In contrast, there are about 2,200 languages spoken in Asia.

 The written word

To the communications skills of listening and speaking were added those of reading and writing. Written records could be stored in libraries and studied, subjected to public scrutiny and improvement and then passed on to the next generation in an improved form. There could now be agreement over matters of fine detail, whether it be engineering, economics, religion, or the law.

Written records were a form of communication needed for the efficient functioning of large and complex societies – to record (at least) their laws, social contracts, and economic transactions. Special training was needed to master a language and this included the storage and modification of important texts, which was the specialized work of scribes, priests, and literate, educated elites.

Libraries had existed in ancient Egypt storing their knowledge on papyrus scrolls, and in ancient Mesopotamia as clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script. Modern paper (word derived from Latin papyrus and Greek πᾰ́πῡρος (pápūros) referring to the pith of the reed Cyperus papyrus which grew on the banks of the Nile) probably dates back to 2nd century BCE China. Manufactured around 750 CE in Samarkand, a city on the Silk Road so, by about 900 CE caravans had spread the ancient knowledge of the classical world eastwards as far as Afghanistan, west to North Africa and Spain. By the 13th century knowledge of paper production had spread from the Middle East to medieval Europe, its manufacture based on hemp, linen and cotton.

The printed word

The meticulously researched Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains 171,476 words (this is omitting inflexions, most obsolete words, archaisms, technical and regional vocabularies, coinages, and neologisms – including 47,156 obsolete words). This we can regard as the upper number for English words in current use. Adults have a vocabulary of 20,000 to 35,000 (average educated adult) words and they learn around 1 new word a day until middle age when vocabulary growth has ceased. Most (95%) English word usage engages around 3,000 of the potential 171,476 words, less than 2% of the available vocabulary, while 1,000 words cover 89% of everyday writing, and the commonest 25 words are used in 33% of everyday writing. In most languages you are regarded as fluent if you use around 10,000+ words – all that is needed to talk about almost any topic in some detail.

The most widely spoken language is Mandarin Chinese which is spoken by nearly three times more people than speak English (the second most widely spoken language). Mandarin, the language pronounced and spoken as in Beijing, consists of 240 linguistic elements called radicals. However, its major components are the approximately 4,000 monosyllabic characters that encompass over 90% of the language encountered by an educated Chinese speaker, although these characters combine into over 80,000 ‘words’.

Creating impressions on surfaces, as used to authenticate a particular trader’s goods, was achieved in Mesopotamia using cylinder seals. However, the world’s earliest known printing was woodblock printing, invented in China before 220 CE, applied to cloth, then used on paper in the 7th century CE.

The world’s oldest printed book is the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text dating back to the year 868 CE.^[3] The world’s first movable type, used to print paper books, was made out of porcelain and was invented by Bi Sheng (990–1051) around 1040 in China. The oldest existing book printed using metal movable type (Jikji) was printed in Korea in 1377.

The first printed books in Europe were produced in Germany by the Gutenberg printing press in 1439, and the first printing press introduced to England by William Caxton in 1476 who was also the pioneer retailer of England’s first printed books. Mechanical printing facilitated the mass-production of information in Industria, for news sheets and the books that encouraged people to learn how to read and write.

Newspapers kept entire cities in touch with what was going on in the world while also being a source of political ideas and entertainment. Knowledge was less the preserve of a privileged and educated few as it had the potential to be accessed by all those who could read.

However, in 1800 and most countries of the world, the majority of citizens were still illiterate. So in Europe, for example, the possession of reading and writing skills, an education, and the accent of a ‘gentlemen’ was sufficient to command a respected place in society.

The development of printing technology meant that the printed word was generated in ever more efficient ways. It lasted for about 500 years until the advent of electronic media that exploded onto the world after World War II with the advent of the computer.

The electronic word

This was a momentous social transition as the world’s accumulated knowledge became available to all those with access to a computer or smartphone, instantaneously – in ‘real time’.

Information is now widely dispersed. The English electronic encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which was established in 2001, now contains 6,142,759 articles (18 August 2020) and dwarfs earlier printed attempts to embrace all knowledge, including massive works of the twentieth century: it exemplifies the near world-wide possession and distribution of knowledge during Informatia and is a high standard work of volunteers rather than the product of dedicated and salaried academics, reflecting the progressive democratization of knowledge.

Wikipedia is a global heir to the tradition of great polymaths and encyclopaedists. In the west this began with Aristotle whose collective works were a summary of the available knowledge of his day arranged by academic disciplines, many of these created by himself and persisting to the present day. This was followed by the great work of the Roman world, Pliny the Elder’s (23/24– 79 CE) editorship of Naturalis Historia. Then, the Enlightenment’s Encyclopédie edited by Diderot (1713 1784) and d’Alembert’s (1717–1783). In the 20th century came many multi-volume works like Encyclopaedia Britannica, all largely superseded by information that is now available online.

This web site takes advantage of this modern means of communication – one individual communicating instantaneously with all those people in the world who have access to the internet.

We are living in an exciting and critical time for humanity.

First published on the internet – 1 March 2019
. . . substantive revision – 30 July 2020
. . . substantive revision – 21 August 2020
. . . minor addition – 1 June 2021

Wall of Love on Montmartre in Paris: “I love you” in 311 languages, by calligraphist Fédéric Baron and artist Claire Kito (2000)
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons – Britchi Mirela – Accessed 15 October 2020