Scholar's Address
a fragment of the Scholar's Address to the Convention
... We can now sketch in a plausible chronology of development. And I would like to hang these developments in a frame of dimensions. I proceed.
Of the mysteries of the origin of language I have nothing to say; that is the province of another's expertise. But once spoken language appears, we can think of communication as taking place in two dimensions, like a line drawn between speaker and hearer and back as the hearer responds either with speaking or with gestures, expressions, etc. Face-to-face we experience the most direct and powerful form of communication, but a record of the exchange does not persist in time (except, problematically, in memory, but that is a special discussion), and it cannot be carried out over any distance at all. My speaking to you on this occasion is this spoken kind of communication.
Writing constitutes the next step, of course. Written communication adds two dimensions to the picture, in that the words of the originator, in being preserved, allow for them to be carried between distant points as well as through long stretches of time. But one dimension is also taken away: namely, the response of the hearer (now the reader); thus, written communication can only be three-dimensional.
It is also dependent upon and constrained by what the Ancients seem to have called technology (that is, speaking by means of a device): writing itself requires two objects that must be fashioned, ultimately, by human hands — something to write with, and something to write upon. I am reminded of this restriction every time I receive a more primitive form of communication (i.e., face-to-face) that I wish to remember, and cannot find my stylus or tablet.
(Hold for laughter.)
The crude progenitor of this form of communication is the painted animal skin or scratched-on tree bark. Its intermediate ascendants are the clay tablet and its cousin the papyrus scroll. The apex of this dynasty, the scion of the house as it were, is the parchment — afterwards paper — codex, or paged book. It was the book that perfected the world of the Ancients, the book in its thousands of millions of instances, that crowned that magnificent edifice of culture.
Unhappily, night fell before the Ancients were able to take the next logical step. But perhaps, like a building with one wrong dimension in the foundation, it was better to have the whole edifice collapse so that it could be rebuilt aright....