In The Artificial Ape, Timothy Taylor questions our very sense of history - what James Gleick calls the "pastness of the past". He asks us to question how we, as humans, came into being, and with that throws our relationship with technology up into the air. Are we who we are because of the technology we invented, or do we have the technology we invented because of who we are?
Gleick discusses oral literature and memory in the light of our own written society. The invention of writing - and of course these days it is difficult to see it as a conscious invention - does not fit into Taylor's own argument, and is clearly an invention that changed the way we think. There is no evidence or even plausible reasoning that humankind invented writing because we could know longer remember enough and needed a way to record what used to be the stuff of memory.
That is not to say that Taylor's argument falls on its face. Obviously he did not intend his line of thinking to apply to every form of technology ever invented, and indeed the invention of the dictionary, described by Gleick in his third chapter, did change the way we write. This is obviously on a smaller scale, but the now inherently human preoccupation with 'the right way of doing things' can be traced back to the codification of the language with the dictionary.
The German language even has a word for it - Rechtschreibung. Though Google gives its translation as nothing more than 'spelling', my German friends assure me it carries with it a far deeper sense of correctness in writing. Such a notion could never have come out of a solely oral language, and in such a way we can say that the invention of writing did alter the way we think. And so perhaps Taylor does triumph in the end, if only in Germany.
Gleick discusses oral literature and memory in the light of our own written society. The invention of writing - and of course these days it is difficult to see it as a conscious invention - does not fit into Taylor's own argument, and is clearly an invention that changed the way we think. There is no evidence or even plausible reasoning that humankind invented writing because we could know longer remember enough and needed a way to record what used to be the stuff of memory.
That is not to say that Taylor's argument falls on its face. Obviously he did not intend his line of thinking to apply to every form of technology ever invented, and indeed the invention of the dictionary, described by Gleick in his third chapter, did change the way we write. This is obviously on a smaller scale, but the now inherently human preoccupation with 'the right way of doing things' can be traced back to the codification of the language with the dictionary.
The German language even has a word for it - Rechtschreibung. Though Google gives its translation as nothing more than 'spelling', my German friends assure me it carries with it a far deeper sense of correctness in writing. Such a notion could never have come out of a solely oral language, and in such a way we can say that the invention of writing did alter the way we think. And so perhaps Taylor does triumph in the end, if only in Germany.
