The Technology of Text

     Back when history began, writing was a secret for a small inner circle of kings and priests and tax collectors. Then a sudden technological advance let ordinary people convert text into audible speech.

     It was 2,700 years ago, and Greece was just another grubby little kingdom until King Cadmus imported the Phoenician alphabet. In an accident of fate, Phoenician used five more letters than the Greeks needed for their language. Like Arabic today, their ancient writing did not include vowels. Cadmus made the huge technological advance of using those extra letters as vowels.

PCLPTC MNNGLSSNSS

     The alphabet became a killer app that converted text into speech. Text became easy to read. Instead of an unending stream of acronyms, text became a flowing transcription of human speech that anybody could decode simply by speaking it aloud. PCLPTC MNNGLSSNSS was easy enough to read if you were already one of the cool kids, but with vowels inserted, suddenly everybody could see if they were merely apocalyptic meaninglessnesses.

     Instead of its former role as a means of secret communications within a cabal, writing became a massive new channel of sharing.

     The Iliad and the Odyssey were oral tales told around the campfire for a thousand years, memorized and handed down from generation to generation. Homer wrote them down in the years after King Cadmus’s innovation.

     When information became easy to share, the accumulation of knowledge turned asymptotic. Within a few generations Greece became the foundation of Western thought and literature. Socrates worried that making literacy easily available to all would result in the destruction of human powers of memory. He was right. Why bother to memorize the ILIAD when you can just look up any passage in a hard-copy print version? Write-once, read-many.

     But the tradeoff was clear: text wasn’t just memory storage; it was a launchpad for new ideas. From vowel insertions to spaces between words, punctuation, and the printing press, writing evolved into one of humanity’s most powerful technologies. The new alphabet turned writing into a medium for storytelling rather than just for regal edicts and tax regulations and inventories and bookkeeping. 

     Today, corporate culture is abandoning the technology of text. Text is a technology that requires an operator. Unlike the passive acceptance of audio and video, a reader must actively extract the thought and meaning in the words.

“Typography bears much resemblance to cinema, just as the reading of print puts the reader in the role of movie projector.”

      –Marshall McLuhan, THE GUTENBERG GALAXY

     Business sites are reverting text to the role of protective camouflage, a deflective shield of minimum compliance and disingenuous cover stories buried under a cascade of trendy buzzwords. Text seems old and outdated, it can’t compete against YouTube and TikTok and Instagram.

     Amid the worldwide media glut, companies have given up caring whether people read their website text: their goal is merely to plunk the text into your view-space. With the right magic SEO dust inserted into the text, the robots will deliver your text directly to your most highly qualified leads. But will they read it while feeling as though they are wading through tar?

     And if that isn’t enough to prevent the sharing of their information, companies present it in ways that visually block the message. Here’s a landing page for some kind of internet-of-things company. The search bots can read it easily. How about you?

     If you battle your way through this illegible text, you learn–nothing. The sentence is an assemblage of vague abstractions. It can only leave readers impatient and irritated at having wasted their time.

     The first goal of effective text should be to reward the reader’s time. Text is a technology that can make information clear, engaging, and effective.

     Language is humanity’s superpower. It’s about the will to share. Good writing embodies this principle. It reveals. It connects. It makes knowledge accessible and ideas contagious. In a world drowning in dull, evasive text, the challenge is clear: let’s make our words count.