In a dusty ancient road in the desert west of the Nile, soldiers, couriers, and traders congregated to swap stories and to write them down in limestone rock. These are now thought to be the earliest known examples of alphabetic writing. These early writings support the idea of the alphabet as an invention by workaday people. This invention simplified and democratized writing, freeing it from the elite hands of official scribes.
As such, alphabetic writing was revolutionary in a sense comparable to the invention of the printing press much later and now the Internet. Alphabetic writing emerged as a kind of shorthand consisting of fewer than 30 symbols, each one representing a single sound, that could be combined to form words for a wide variety of ideas and things.
Think how revolutionary the printing press and alphabetic writing were. And then ask: “where will the Internet go and what will happen to your work?”[i] Think of these early communication technologies and realize how the Internet is doing pretty much the same thing. People are gathering around the electronic stream, swapping stories, building community, and working in Brand U ways.
[i] Wilford, John Noble, “Finds in Egypt Date Alphabet in Earlier Era,” NY Times, November 14, 1999, p. 1.