Aiden Digital Tools 1
Historian’s Views on Language
Historians like Jack Goody and Marc De Van Meiroop argue that the way people write can shape how they think. When comparing ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform to the later Greek alphabet, the historians show us that there is more to writing systems than just keeping records. For example scribes figured out how to organize these writings and people are allowed to look back at these writings over time, which develops logic and philosophy. Goody and Watt argue that literacy changes thinking because writing makes ideas solid and permanent, making them easier to o back to and criticize. The Greek alphabet was simpler and easier to learn, so more people could read and write. Since alphabetic writing breaks speech into simple letters, it helped people look at language and ideas more carefully. When seeing written arguements over time, Greek philosophers learned to be more logical and were able to use this for debates.
Van De Mieroop argues that in ancient Mesopotamia, knowledge was usually passed down through stories, lists, and commentaries that kept traditional ideas together. Cuneiform writing was very complicated and took many years to learn, so only trained scribes could read and write. Van De Mieroop proves this by saying “Thus there existed a large variety of potential readings and interpretations of every word and cuneiform sign. While all this seems confusing on the level of the individual signs, when they were read in a sequence the correct reading was obvious to anyone who knew the language…” (7, Mieroop) Unless you were a specialist in Cuneiform, you were going to have a lot of trouble interpreting it, so people focused more on keeping tradition than debating new ideas.
The main idea is that writing systems can make different kinds of thinking easier or harder. More complex systems controlled by experts protect tradition, but simpler systems that many people can use encourage thinking and new ideas. Connecting this to digital communication today, programming languages shape what programmers can build and who takes part in technology. If a programming language is hard to learn, only experts can use it and people will easily give up when trying to learn. Easier tools allow more people to create and experiment, which leads to more ideas and more popularity. Digital communication today also shapes how people think. Social media and texting make it easy to share and store ideas in no time, but they also encourage short messages and fast reactions.