MOST OF HUMAN civilisation has been powered by the advancement of group messaging, by the quality and nature of information flows within society.
As messaging improved, the size and complexity of society grew accordingly. Language expanded to become scripts. Scripts required scribes, and this privileged group soon decided what words to practise, what worldview to perpetuate and what daily discourses to popularise.
Scribes became holy men; scripts generated holy books and scriptures, and control over what scribes wrote became the base for power, for “hegemony” in Antonio Gramsci’s sense of the word. Coherence in group messaging, cohesion in political purpose, and control of the arms of government came to rely greatly on what got written.
With the invention and re-invention of printing—first in China, and then in the West—universal literacy, though not achieved even today, became a long-term possibility.
