The Changes Brought by Written Knowledge

The transition from oral knowledge to writing brought change not just to the form with which knowledge was passed on, but to society itself. Writing brings a different slant and political meaning than does oral knowledge, it helps to standardize a language, and it brings about entire institutions based on writing and written knowledge.

Reading changes the way people think. Rather than the classic discussion and Socratic Seminar, writing makes knowledge individualized. You no longer need to wait for a teacher, like Plato, to teach you. The knowledge is sitting on the page, waiting for you to take the initiative and absorb it. The school system changed completely. Rather than seminars and lectures, the main focus of school became to learn to read and write. It seemed that school became a place to learn how to convey ideas, rather than a place to learn to develop them. Schools became standardized and uniform, enabling the spread of empires.

As written knowledge developed, political and religious institutions started using it as an authorization method. They could both publish propaganda (see Emily's post) and destroy unfavorable texts whether it was with fire or theft.

Not only did institutions use writing to authorize themselves, but entire establishments were born out of written knowledge. The library is an institution that only exists where there is writing. You cannot have a library without writing.

Other establishments were changed because of written knowledge. Monasteries became places involved a lot with making codexes. Monks would spend hours upon hours painstakingly copying texts and ornately decorating them.

Another example of how a changing knowledge system changes current institutions is found in our textbook, Reinventing Knowledge by Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton. Speaking of the Montecassino Monastery, McNeely and Wolverton mention that "the 1,500-year-old cloister has recently established its own website". They go on to explain that "longevity is integral to the monastery, part of its institutional DNA". This explains why monks would spend hours, weeks, months, and even years to complete a single book. Copying these codexes both furthered the knowledge held within the monastery and the life of the monastery itself. The small Bible our class saw at the Harold B. Lee Library, with its fancy gold embossing and colored illustrations, would have provided a substantial amount of income to a small monastery. Transcribing religious texts would also have enabled the monks to promote their belief system.

In Samaria, the alphabet was developed in order to write religious texts. It was evolved from the Hebrew alphabet. It is still used today as one of the two main writing systems. The Samaritan Hebrew, used for the reading of the Samaritan Pentateuch, is accompanied by the Samaritan Aramaic, which is used for scholarly literature. The pronunciations of both are similar, but not exactly the same. It's interesting to me that different subjects bear both different alphabets and different pronunciations. It seems a nice way to keep the lines of secular and religious from blurring, however. With different alphabets, no one would be confused as to whether they were reading a religious text or merely a scholar's opinion. In this way, the writing system provides clarity and distinction to a language and to the beliefs of a culture.