My previous post was titled The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art is a compelling new book by Kevin Ashton. There are eight chapters in that book, titled as follows:
Chapter 1 A Million Years of Stories 1
Chapter 2 The Eye of Your Mind 34
Chapter 3 Pictures of Sounds 59
Chapter 4 The War of Stories 92
Chapter 5 The All-Seeing Eye of Providence 136
Chapter 6 One One Zero 169
Chapter 7 Death by a Thousand Stories 210
Chapter 8 The Hyperreal Thing 250
Here are another three quotations out of this book. The tenth section in the fourth chapter, The War of Stories, is titled Story Factories. It begins on the bottom of page 130:
“Wood based paper first appeared in Germany in the 1840s, and by the end of the 1870s most printers in North America and Western Europe were using it. Not long after that, all paper was made from wood and none was made from rags. In less than thirty years, the price of paper fell by over 90 percent. In 1860 a pound of rags cost 44 US cents before pulping. In 1889, a pound of wood cost 4 cents after pulping. The invention of the mass production of mass communication, started by Gutenberg 450 years earlier was complete. An industrial revolution had transformed storytelling, and now there were story factories all over the world.
Those factories produced ever more stories, told by ever more storytellers, reproduced ever more times. In 1449, the year before Gutenberg’s printing press became operational, Europeans published two thousand new books and made an average of twenty-five copies of each one. In 1900, after paper made from wood replaced paper made from rags, Europeans published twenty thousand new books and, on average, there were twenty-five hundred copies of each one: ten times more stories a year, told by ten times more storytellers, to a hundred times more people.”
The second section in the fifth chapter, The All-Seeing Eye of Providence, is titled Experience. It begins on page 139:
“We are now halfway through The Story of Stories. The first half covered a million years of storytelling, from the first nightfires to the first telecommunications; the second half covers only two hundred years.
This imbalance – four chapters for one million years, four chapters for 200 years – arises because the book’s structure is not time but change, and change is not linear: Its rate increases so much that the next two hundred years of the story of stories contains as much change as the first million years.
When we look at almost any example of long-term human progress, we see change speeding up around the fifteenth century. This acceleration was once mistaken for a sudden springlike return to creation after a centuries-long winterlike freeze: a ‘renaissance’ preceded by ‘dark ages.’ The various versions of this mistake are all story-shaped: They center heroic protagonists and, by implication, individual human agency, hidden behind hand-wavy vaguenesses like culture or faith.
This ever-increasing, ever-continuing rate of change is not caused by individual human agency. The change causes itself, especially the change in storytelling. Our increasing acceleration of innovation arises from our accumulation of equality, liberty, and freedom of thought; of health, life expectancy, and population; and of time for nonsubsistence activities, all of which exist because we have ever more ways to share experience using stories.
Experience is knowledge that we have stored and recorded. Before we could recall and retell stories, we stored our experiences in the error-prone, personal, private, and, above all, mortal medium of memory. The rise of storytelling, through speaking, singing, painting, writing, and printing, enshrined ever more experience in ways ever more immortal. Printing is especially good at transforming one person’s experience into everyone’s experience: Frederick Douglass died in 1895, for example, but we can forever share some of his lived experience as a slave by reading his books.
The invention of the printing press enabled and inspired ever more inventions for storing and sharing experiences, among them the first atlas in 1482, the first postal service in 1516, the first book of mathematical references and tables in 1533, the first peer-reviewed scientific journal in 1655, the first school textbook in 1690, and the first bookstore in 1732.
These inventions laid the foundation for an explosion of new storytelling technologies, many of them powered by electricity, in the nineteenth century, including the first electric telegraph in 1816, the first free, taxpayer-funded public library in 1833, the first photograph in 1838, the first paperback in 1841, the first practical typewriter in 1867, the first carbon copy in 1870 (now the vestigial ‘cc’ – carbon copy – and ‘bcc’ -blind carbon copy – options in the ‘send’ field of every email), the first telephone in 1876, the first duplicating machine for low-volume home, school, and office use in 1886, the first record player in 1887, and the first movie screening and the first radio transmission in 1895.
The speed with which we invented, improved, and industrialized these electricity-powered storytelling tools was a consequence of the accelerative, self-reinforcing effect of shared experience. New story-telling technologies create new storytelling technologies. Where writing took five thousand years to mature and spread around the world, and printing took two thousand years, the electrified storytelling tools of the 1800s developed and dispersed in little more than a century.
These inventions turned the nineteenth century into what we would now call an age of big data, where someone sitting at their kitchen table could benefit from the thoughts and experiences of others, of almost any kind, from almost any place and time, and preserve their own thoughts and experiences in handwriting, or as a printing-like typewritten manuscript that could be duplicated cheaply and in any quantity, from one to millions.
The inventions of the nineteenth century also laid the foundation for a twentieth-century storytelling technology: the television, invented by Philo Farnsworth in 1927, 111 years after the invention of the electric telegraph.”
The eighth section in the fifth chapter, The All-Seeing Eye of Providence, is titled A New Literacy. On page 160:
“Reading only writing may have been sufficient when writing was the only technology of story, but it is not enough today. Everyone must be able to ‘read’ stories no matter what technology is being used to tell them.
This technology-independent literacy is sometimes called transliteracy, a term that originated in 2005 with Alan Liu, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and means ‘the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks,’
Transliteracy is especially well understood by librarians, the underground freedom fighters in the war of stories, whose sworn duty is to connect people in the universe of the mass of humanity to knowledge. For example, here is Tom Ipri, a senior librarian at Temple University in Philadelphia, describing transliteracy’s importance:
Not only does transliteracy question previous assumptions of authority, it also calls into question the often assumed privilege of printed text. Transliteracy is not unique in questioning this bias – media literacy efforts have certainly tried to raise the profile of nonprint materials. But transliteracy is unique in combining democratizing communication formats, expressing no preference of one over the other, with emphasizing the social construction of meaning via diverse media. Because of the ways in which transliteracy questions authority and devalues hierarchical structures for disseminating information, transliteracy overlaps concerns much at the heart of librarianship.”
Very detailed notes at the back of Kevin’s book point out that the above statement by Tom Ipri was edited for length from one in 2010 – it is a paraphrase rather than an exact quotation. You can find the original article by Tom Ipri at College and Research Library News (2010, Volume 71, Number 10) titled Introducing transliteracy: What does it mean to academic libraries? Also see the Wikipedia page for Transliteracy.
The 1904 drawing of a mysterious stranger (at the top left) telling a story came from the Library of Congress.
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