Word: a media ecology critique of the "technologizing of the word"

Over the last few weeks I have spent a lot of my time reading about the concept of the word. By word I don't mean isolated forms or specific languages/diction; I am thinking much more generically about the importance and function of language as relates to humanity's existential quest. Let me clarify what I am thinking about here more clearly. When I say "language" or "word" most people (self included) immediately jump a conception that is based on something (linguistic, text, literary, whatever) that is other than people. In our modern sensibilities, we tend of think of language, of the word as an abstract construct; something that exists independent of and (most importantly) in isolation from people's lived experience. This peculiar condition is the result of modern humanity's impact and use of words, it hasn't always been this way.

Legalistic tendencies in contemporary societies are extreme manifestations of how cold, calculated, and closed our autocratic ideas about language and words have become. As an example consider how Christendom treats the Bible as literally the Word(s) of God. Hence, the Bible in many Christian circles is parochially defined as the complete manual and or standard by which Christian ought to live their lives. The impetus to "live by the book" has become the ultimate standard for many a Christian.

I'm starting to disagree with this set up more and more.

The Bible is not God; it cannot and does not contain the entire spectrum of the experience of Christianity. As a matter of fact, those leather bound books filled with somewhat cryptic notations put there by a printing press, are just that dead symbols. They are merely indicative relics of the existence of an encoder/source (of the symbols) and a decoder/receiver. I realize that by evoking the sender/receiver model I have conjured up notions of the Sender/Message/Receiver model of communication. This is not at all what I intend to show. My present focus is the simple, but oft overlooked fact that, the dynamism (Greek: dunamis) of the "The Word," and indeed every word/language depends something/someone outside of it for its creation, encryption, and decryption. In other words, the intrinsic value of words is extrinsically sourced. Words are symbols.

Humor me with a brief exploration of the etymology of the term "word." According to Fr. Walter On in Orality and Literacy (p.32) the Hebrew term dabar means both "event" and "word." Walter Fisher in Human Communication as Narration (p.5) provides the Greek equivalent, logos, which meant "story, reason, rationale, conception, discourse, thought." Both these classical forms of our contemporary term ("word") connote a sense of the term much wider than our current use.

What happened? When exactly did the dunamis of the word separate itself from the action, from the "story, reason, rationale, conception, discourse, thought" of humanity makings words objects unto themselves, in a word, creating the logocentric reality?

Recede with me to quaint antiquity all the way back to the middle of the 4th century BC. There we a find a world unencumbered by a task you and I find mundane, hardly noteworthy, indeed a task so trivial that the contemporary world has automated it and made it as painless as possible; this task is simply writing. Yet it is not a minor or disposable task; writing is one thing our society cannot do without.

It is the task that called out Gutenburg's printing press from the higher recesses of the human mind; this printing press quickly gave rise to capitalism, reformed Catholicism, and Protestantism all in which in some form are at the core of human existence in many parts of the world today; the printing press also heralded the arrival of what Neil Postman in Amusing ourselves to death fashions the "typographic" era in which books became ubiquitous and as a result indexing came to being. Indexing is important to this discussion as it the predecessor of the dictionary which as we know embodies the final step in the separation of dunamis of words from being anthropocentric to being logocentric. In short, writing gave us words, at least in the sense that we understand them today.

While writing brought many benefits to humankind, it also wrought unnumerable, irreparable damage to the intrinsic worth of our species. Peter Preuss notes in the introduction to Nietzsche's On the advantage and disadvantage of history for life that:

Man, unlike the animal, is self-conscious. He is aware that he is alive and that he must die. And because he is self-conscious he is not only aware of living, but of living well or badly. Life is not wholly something that happens to man; it is also something that he engages in according to values he follows. Human existence is a task.

It is my contention that words (in the dabar, and logos sense) are tools for the task of humanity's existential quest. In letting their original dunamis evolve from something outside of ourselves (i.e. from words themselves as in logocentrism), we surrendered an important part of what distinguishes us from a herd of cattle or a swine of pigs. In a sense, writing debased us.

The efficacy of these words that you are reading right now is in you and not in the words on the screen. Without you they are mere vacuous symbols.