Today, I was thinking about the invention of writing, and whether it ranks as man’s greatest invention (besides, of course, the Internet). As with most attempts to crown “the greatest ever,” it depends on your point of view and is subject to debate. Certainly, agriculture and the domestication of animals are pretty important, too. But writing is clearly up there on the list.
Before writing, all transmission of knowledge was oral and, therefore, limited by the need for face-to-face contact as well as death. DNA lets us pass our genes on to subsequent generations (as long as we manage to reproduce). Prior to the advent of the written word (somewhere around 3000 BC in Mesopotamia, now Syria and Iran), if you didn’t teach what you knew to someone else, the knowledge died with you. Of course, writing doesn’t do much good unless someone knows how to read it.
It’s fun to consider that, if audio recording technology had been invented before written language, we might never have invented writing. The need for preserving spoken language would have been met in a completely different way: We’d listen instead of reading (although for efficiency, the written word has it all over the spoken word. I much prefer reading a transcript to get information than to listen to an hour-long video of the same thing). But I digress….
All this thinking about reading and writing got started because I wanted to let you know about Medium (www.medium.com), “a better place to read and write things that matter.” Medium is the brainchild of Evan Williams, who previously created Blogger and helped found Twitter, and Biz Stone, who was one of Evan’s co-founders at Twitter. In some ways, Medium is a response to the 140-character limitation of Twitter. It’s a place intended for sharing ideas at whatever length best suits their presentation.
Currently, you need to have a Twitter account to “join” Medium, which may be a stumbling block for those of you without Twitter accounts. I encourage you to sign up for Twitter anyway, and then join Medium. Why? Because then you’ll get a weekly digest of interesting things to read on Medium. It comes every Friday, with a list of “10 weekend reads,” and I usually find three or four to be interesting enough to check out. One thing I really like about Medium is each post has an estimated reading time attached to it, so I can decide in advance whether I have time to read the post.
Of course, you don’t need to sign up just to read the posts on Medium. For a start, why not visit the site and see if any of the posts catch your fancy? Related posts are grouped into “collections,” including ones titled Armchair Economics, Boinkology 101, IMHO, Lessons Learned and many others. And people who like RSS can get a feed from any collection, including Editor’s Picks. If you use an RSS reader like Feedly, Flipboard or Digg Reader, it’s a reasonable alternative to joining Medium just to get the weekly newsletter.
Who writes for Medium? Writing is still by invitation only, and Medium admits it commissions some articles, presumably to drive traffic to the site. If you expect to get paid for your work, you should contact Medium directly with a pitch. But if you have a desire to get your idea(s) into the mainstream, Medium presents a way of doing so. The danger, of course, is getting lost in all the other content being posted.
I’ve been granted the ability to post to Medium, but so far I haven’t taken advantage of this unpaid “opportunity.” Even though the majority of Medium contributors aren’t being paid for their posts, it doesn’t mean the writing is crap. In fact, one of the reasons I’m taking time to recommend Medium is because the writing—done for free—is so good.
Of course, all this presumes you’re pretty much a reading junkie like me. To quote one of Robert Heinlein’s characters in Glory Road: “The fact is I am a compulsive reader.” For me, the Internet is a dangerous thing—there’s always more to be read. It’s a potentially infinite time sink. At least with tools like Medium and Next Draft (www.nextdraft.com/current), there’s a better chance I’m reading something that’s well written, interesting and useful.
There’s been some concern that the Internet—more properly, the World Wide Web, which is really what your browser delivers to you—is another nail in the coffin of literacy. If all you do is watch YouTube videos, then it may be true. But I think the Web is fundamentally powered by words. Certainly those words are enhanced by the addition of images, video, and sound. But when we go looking for something on the Web, we use words. Google search results are predominantly words (although it does try to serve up relevant images and videos, based on the words that appear around them on Web pages). Wikipedia is full of words. It’s words all the way down….
As for writing, the Web offers an unprecedented platform for spreading ideas through the written word. If you have an idea, you can put that idea in front of potentially billions of people for free, via a tool like Blogger, WordPress.com or Tumblr (or Medium, if you’re lucky). The real trick is making sure good ideas get the attention they deserve. Medium is a small step in that direction.
Maybe voice recognition will someday cause written language to die out, the way long division skills withered after the advent of the calculator, and we’ll all be listening to audio recordings instead of reading books (brief flash of the Eloi in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine—did the Morlocks know how to read and write?). But for now, the Web all about reading and writing. And that makes me happy, both as a reading junkie and a columnist. Use those writing skills to share your ideas with me at mduffy@northbaybiz.com.
