Often when we think about writing, we think about it in its most grandiose forms. We think about literature. We think about poetry. We think about philosophical treatises on the nature of death. Writing is spoken of in hushed tones, as if it’s a sacred object to be venerated. It has to be big. It has to be glorious.
But this is to overlook what is more fundamental about writing, and what makes it such a transformative human invention.
Writing is, at its core, text production. And when you think about it that way, you understand that writing isn’t any one thing in particular, but is rather, a tool. It is a tool to get abstract ideas from the brain and mouth onto a page where it can travel across space, maintain its existence over time, and enter the minds of other humans.
Symbols
Nowhere is this basic function of writing more obvious than in its origins: a simple notation device.
The first evidence we have of a complete writing system is in ancient Mesopotamia. Here it was used to label commercial goods in storage containers. It was largely pictographic at first, evolving (we think) from pictures of the goods contained within.
It is obvious in this case that we are dealing with mere symbols. If I want to denote a jar full of olives, I simply draw an olive as a symbolic replacement of the concept of olive.
As time went on, the symbols lost all trace of their pictographic origins and came to represent morphemes, syllables, and words, without looking like any object at all. In the English case, our script represents phonemes (basic sounds). But this is little different. All of these are symbols. They represent concepts in the mind. And by doing so, they allow our minds to live in the material world, and to be passed on to other minds.
When we think about writing as symbolic reference to concepts, we can see easily how writing opens up all sorts of functions previously unavailable to the human mind.
Literature
It took quite a while for humans to go from denoting commodity information on clay tokens, to writing great works of literature. But eventually, we discovered symbolic text was able to communicate deeply immaterial concepts, about our culture, our desires, our virtues and vices.
The Epic of Gilgamesh (again Mesopotamia) is the oldest known example of a complete work of fiction. Of course, we had been telling such stories for thousands of years. But now we had a way to concretise these imagined worlds that reside usually in our minds.
It was quite the leap really, though it may not seem so now. We had used text only to represent basic counting information. Who had the bright idea take that very same symbolic text, and tell a story?
What they realised is the basic truth about writing: it is a tool for the expression of literally every single thing we can hold in our minds and say with our tongue. And given that understanding, it’s no wonder stories were born on paper, among much else.
Vital
Literature is by no means the only vital purpose for text production. Yes it takes so much of the limelight, but there are equally important, or arguably more important functions we barely even notice.
Every day we see text of this vital sort. It’s in our homes, our streets, our schools, and our workplaces. And without it, our lives would be far more difficult, more brief, and more fraught with suffering.
When we come to a fork in the road, signs tell us, through text, which path to take. When we take medicine, the packet tells us how much to take, and when, and in what conditions. This sort of text surrounds us at every turn, so ubiquitous and unobtrusive that we rarely think of it as writing at all.
Text like this essentially reduces our need to know. Humans have limited capacity to hold information in our heads. I can’t remember every single street to turn down. I can’t know what every single medication is and how it should be taken. But luckily, we don’t have to. We have little inky symbols to do that for use. All we need to know is how to interpret them.
Correspondence.
For the majority of human history, verbal communication was geographically limited to the person standing next to you. Either that or the fella across the street who might want to watch the footy with you this afternoon, if only you can yell loud enough.
So in the ancient world, communication across distance was incredibly difficult. Sure, you could send a spoken message with a messenger. But that puts an immense burden on the messenger, not to mention that the messenger could get the message wrong, or indeed, lie.
But that all changed with writing.
Writing gave us the chance to correspond. In international relations, this made communication, cooperation, and conquest far easier and faster. But perhaps even more importantly, it gave individuals the opportunity to maintain contact with loved ones over distance.
Imagine your Roman husband goes to manage a province in Asia. Or your son goes to study in the universities of Italy during the renaissance. Or your daughter elopes to Australia with a handsome fish merchant named Barnaby. Letters kept us together and thus opened up the world to private travel. A scratch on clay here, some ink on parchment there, and the world shrinks.
Today the time gap has been eradicated. Instantaneous correspondence is ubiquitous and a part of us all. But this is new. And for so much longer than that, we relied upon the pen.
Reminders.
Now we get to the truly mundane. Something that would basically never come to mind when we use the word “writing”. But again, my point is not to highlight the spectacular. It is instead to highlight writing as a single tool applicable to a myriad of human needs.
These days writing helps us to remember in the digital space. We keep schedules, use google calendar, or get fed up with yet another garbage productivity app. But we’ve been doing this all on paper for a quite a while now. In fact, I still do it on paper. I keep notebooks to remind myself of appointments, jot down thoughts or phone numbers or passwords I could never possibly remember, or draw doodles of super cool robots.
By writing these sorts of notes we augment our memory: we use an object external to our minds, to bolster its ability to perform its normal cognitive functions. We seldom think of writing this way, as an augment. But it is arguably the greatest human augment we have.
So maybe it’s not so mundane after all. If memory is a key part of the human psyche, then we have utterly supercharged our capacity with ink. That's pretty extraordinary. In regards to our memory, we're already cyborgs.
Tweet
I know it’s called “x”, but I can’t bring myself to call it that. Twitter is just such an apt name. And “tweeting” even more so. It really captures this short form casual text we’ve become so accustomed to. Not just for Twitter but text messages, meme pages, and all other forms of internet communication.
Unlike all the others (literature, notation, reminders, etc.) this one is really new. Perhaps we can see its forebears in the notes we used to pass round class with dirty jokes in slang form so the teacher wouldn’t get it. But really, this is a fresh usage.
Now, tweety texts are as ubiquitous as leaves in the Amazon. Every day, humankind sends literally billions of these things for a variety of reasons. Short, slangified, abbreviated messages, to set up social dates, make jokes, criticise government, and talk about cute puppies with bows on their ears tripping over their own feet. OMG so cuteeee!
Tweeting, and other short social media text, is often derided as bad for writing. It condenses complex ideas into tiny spaces that can't possibly do them justice. It reduces our ability, so it's said, to create longer and more complete texts.
Be that as it may, one can't deny the form's significance. Social media text has altered the political, moral, and aesthetic landscape, for better or worse. Short form social text is here to stay and worthy of awe, if not respect.
Finale
My purpose is not to make a moral assessment of writing as text. What I claim is that, at its core, writing is no more than text. Any time we produce text, it is writing. That means the impact of writing is much larger than we often believe it to be. Whatever it is we are, modern humans that is, we aren't it (in our current form) without text production.