STS200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Jared Diamond, Centrism
29 Mar 2017
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Objective: writing both aimed to control people and, as logocentric, dismissed myth as a false world picture. Writing is a form of conventional measurement and storage (a technological revolution). Writing was invented for the purpose of making lists, keeping taxes. Information then becomes power (it entrenches the elite) or social order. Scribes: small amount of people who worked for the elite who have knowledge of writing. Ancient writing"s main function was to facilitate the. Subversion: when writing becomes easier to learn as a result of a small amount of symbols to learn. Writing that becomes phonetic or syllabic allows for the diffusion of power because it incorporates sound and allows more people to understand it. Logos = written word , a word that is stable, rationally principled and logical. Writing abstracts away from the multi-layered function of speech. Writing allows us to transmit information further, i. e. through time. Writing makes it possible to appear more objective than human speech.
