Cultural history on a grand scale, this immensely readable book-the summation of decades of study by one of the world's great scholars of the book-is the story of writing from its very beginnings to its recent transformations through technology. Traversing four millennia, Martin offers a chronicle of writing as a cultural system, a means of communication, and a history of technologies. He shows how the written word originated, how it spread, and how it figured in the evolution of civilization. Using as his center the role of printing in making the written way of thinking dominant, Martin examines the interactions of individuals and cultures to produce new forms of "writing" in the many senses of authorship, language rendition, and script. Martin looks at how much the development of writing owed to practical necessity, and how much to religious and social systems of symbols. He describes the precursors to writing and reveals their place in early civilization as mnemonic devices in service of the spoken word. The tenacity of the oral tradition plays a surprisingly important part in this story, Martin notes, and even as late as the eighteenth century educated individuals were trained in classical rhetoric and preferred to rely on the arts of memory. Finally, Martin discusses the changes to writing wrought by the electronic revolution, offering invaluable insights into the influence these new technologies have had on children born into the computer age.
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Powerful Writing
11 July 2000
By Margaret Lantry
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
If you, like me, are fascinated by the history of ideas then this is a book for you. This work explains to us, who are accustomed to writing (whether "by hand" or on keyboards), what the change to uniform alphabets and writing skills brought. What was it like to be living through this change? The era when writing became universal (amongst a certain class of society at least) must have been like when email swept through our society. And, of course, that is why this topic is so fascinating -- we can conceptualize this change because we ourselves are living through a similar change. Just as the printing press produced an ocean of information and subsequent societal upheaval, so is the present era of the electronic publisher, that is everyone who has internet access. I recommend this book not only because of its fascinating content but also for the depth of scholarship and research. It is readable yet not patronizing. I am reminded of another book that shines for me -- Lucien Febvre's "The Coming of the Book" -- which was also a feast of ideas and concepts. Another aspect of these books is that they are written on the European mainland where many of the changes described took place and so the authors' scholarship benefits from that viewpoint. A less Anglo-American-centric view of the world is presented and our knowledge is richer for this. Both of these books are fortunate too in their translators which enable non-francophones to delve into the world that was before mass communication.
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