Writing
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"O most ingenious Theuth ... you who are the father of letters ... this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth."--Phaedrus by Plato "[W]ith the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case." --"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935) by Walter Benjamin "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see".--The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897) by Joseph Conrad "The history of the various primitive graphic systems, such as the Chinese, the Cuneiform, or the Egyptian, shows that the art of writing has invariably begun with hieroglyphic ideograms, slowly developed into phonograms, and passing gradually through syllabism towards alphabetism, the successive stages of the process occupying in every instance vast periods of time."--The History of the Alphabet (1899) by Isaac Taylor |
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Writing, in its most common sense, is the preservation and the preserved text on a medium, with the use of signs or symbols. In that regard, it is to be distinguished from illustrating such as cave drawings and paintings on the one hand, and authoring such as tape recordings, and film or movies, on the other. Writing was first invented by the ancient Mesopotamians.
Historical significance of writing systems
Historians draw a distinction between prehistory and history, with history defined by the advent of writing. The cave paintings and petroglyphs of prehistoric peoples can be considered precursors of writing, but are not considered writing because they did not represent language directly.
Namesakes
- Writing on Drugs, 1999, Sadie Plant
- Writing Degree Zero, 1953, Roland Barthes
See also
- Effects of movable type printing on culture
- Walter Benjamin on the importance of printing and movable type
- Constrained writing
- Automatic writing
- Graffiti
- Graphocentrism
- Literature
- Reading
- Letter (alphabet)
- Manuscript culture
- Writing about music is like dancing about architecture