It's hard for us to imagine today, but no spaces separated the words in early writing. In the books inked by scribes, words ran together without any break across every line on every page, in what's now referred to as scriptura continua. The lack of word separation reflected language's origins in speech. When we talk, we don't insert pauses between each word - long stretches of syllables flow unbroken from our lips. It would never have crossed the minds of the first writers to put blank spaces between words. They were simply transcribing speech, writing what their ears told them to write. - The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, pg. 61
Carr goes on to explain that early readers experienced a "cognitive burden" trying to pick out the words from the continuous line of letters. Spaces were introduced to make reading easier. Hyperlinks and other distractions on the Internet are again creating a cognitive burden, according to Carr, by forcing us to make decisions while we are reading (do I click on the link?) rather than focus on what the words are telling us.
One of my arguments for writing being further from meaning than the spoken word is that writing is a graphical representation of sounds. It refers back to the spoken word, not to meaning. D-O-G tells you how to pronounce the word "dog," it doesn't tell you what a dog is.
The spaces between words, however, are not there because people pause between each word when speaking, but to help readers understand the text more quickly. They ease the cognitive burden. It is so hard to understand the written word, so laborious, that we have to add things that aren't there so that we can comprehend a text at a speed that approaches our comprehension abilities with the spoken word. And, it is not just spaces we have added. We have punctuation, we have altered word order, we have italics and bold and big and small. All in an attempt to make writing as readily understandable as speaking.
Then there is this business of the Internet. Are we moving further from meaning as we further technologize the word? Um...yeah.
We worked to ease the cognitive burden of reading so that we could spend more time thinking about meaning and less time thinking about deciphering. But the Internet is increasingly distracting - increasingly burdensome. We get so caught up looking for information, we fail to pay much attention to what we find. (This is the main thrust of Carr's book. Forgive me for making these bold claims without elaborating on them. He's done that for me.)
The digital word isn't trying to be like the spoken word. It isn't trying to be easily understood. It is like a living thing, trying only to propagate itself. The digital word is all about more and more and more digital words. But if we are too distracted to pay attention to what these words say and certainly too distracted to remember for more than a few moments - then they don't say anything.
Maybe this is all a little dramatic. Clearly, I like the Internet. Hello out there blog readers, I hope you are enjoying all my tasty digital words! Just try not to forget me when you click on the next link...
