The way we communicate

Is the written word no longer important?

It’s a truism that people of our consultants’ generation, when tasked with learning something, would look for a book on the subject, while young adults nowadays find a video.  While we have now discovered the utility of a google search (which is by no means perfect), it is true that we’re generally more comfortable following a written explanation, while younger people learn by watching.  Are we, then, heading for a world in which the dominance of the written word is ended?

It hasn’t always been dominant.  While writing was invented something like five thousand years ago, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the majority of people even in advanced countries became literate.  And the literate societies of  ancient Greece and Rome were still primarily verbal.  The art of speaking directly to a crowd was a skill required of anyone entering politics.  We have lost a great deal in those Greek tragic plays that have survived, because they were written down primarily as an aid to memory, not as works to be read silently.  (For instance, speakers are not identified, and of course there are no stage directions.)

The tribes who settled in Europe after the fall of Rome were mostly illiterate, so their culture was primarily verbal.  Even when we find legal documents in Old English, say one granting land to a monastery, the granting was actually done verbally.  If doubts arose later, the witnesses would be asked to search their memories; the document was only a way to find out who to talk to about it.

We have traced the rise of an actual written culture to Carolingian times and the invention of the question mark.  (We’re not certain how many professional historians would agree.)  Through Medieval times it was still quite small, primarily made up of monks and clerks at court, but gradually writings on paper gained more legal weight and cultural importance.  With the invention of printing and widespread literacy European culture (at least) could be said to be dominated more by the written than the spoken word.

So with the generational shift from the book to the video are we seeing the same sort of cultural change?  We don’t think so.  First, identifying a culture as verbal, written or video is a simplification.  Cultures are not monolithic.  One of our consultants served a two-year fellowship in the US government, where he discovered that Congress is primarily a verbal culture; paper is for staffers.  And our tutor reports that many students, forced by the pandemic to learn primarily from videos, are having a hard time.  Members of a video generation, they are discovering the limitations of the form.

But our tutor still wishes that his students would read more.