The invention of the word is the medium without which no media in the world exists, social media included.
And it’s not just about media and social media, it’s about everything we have a word for and know.
How come?
To understand what this means takes not just looking at, but seeing the story of inventions that preceded the invention of words:
Invented 13,750 years ago — when the age was stone, the Sahara green, Northern Europe under 1-mile-thick ice — the word allowed the animals for the first time since they themselves had been invented 600 million years earlier, to communicate by words.
What does that tell us?
It’s telling us, the descendants of the first word-users 13,750 years ago, that we’ve communicated wordlessly during the first 5,986,250 years of our existence.
In percentages, we’ve communicated without words during the first 98% of our existence, and only 2% of our most recent existence.
Though we’re meanwhile 2% AW (After Words), we still do not know the purpose of words any more than we know the purpose of energy, fire, air, earth, water, cells, plants, animals, eyes, and brains.
“Why?” is the foundation of every curiousity, and “why words?” is no exception. It’s what kept me busy since I ever first saw a word for what it is, back in 2016.
SOCIAL
Communication — commune action — is social by definition and communication by words is no exception.
Every invention AW (After Words) exists only because in the beginning is the invention of the word.
At the risk of repeating today’s post headline, without the invention of the original medium, the word, none of the subsequent media exist.
PS. To understand media, the book to read is Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”.
Whatever controls the media, controls the word-user.
- “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty, psychic or physical.” – Marshall McLuhan
- “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.” – Marshall McLuhan
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