What is the power of text? It's no simple question when you start to think about the biological realities of perception and cognition. When you read, the patterns of letters, more specifically the light that bounces off the pages of books or emanates from the textual substrate of electronic media, hits your eye, is focused through an ingenious jelly lens onto the highly specialized retinal receptor cells that transform that light, (that very same sunlight that came erupting out of the unimaginable blinding inferno of nuclear fusion that is the sun, not ten minutes before, right off that page after tangling briefly (we're not equipped to understand how briefly) with the outer electron configuration of the generally tree-manufactured cellulosic infrastructure. Or, for you electronic technoscentii out there, gets generated by firing streams of electrons at the inside surface of a vacuum tube. But screw the screen, man, that's just more tricks with static and magnets. That light hits those receptor cells in your retinas; they convert that light into a chain of chemical reactions that relay the visual impression of the patterns made by that light (that same light!) into the mass of gelatinous tissue in your skull that translates text to words and words to ideas: because of the energy in that light and because of the shapes of those words, those letters, that text, a change occurs in the mind. Text hacks the human mind. It can lie quiescent for a hundred years and still be good to go just by turning a page. It retains its power after its creator is dead. A particularly influential pattern of text may be reproduced endlessly at a tiny fraction of the cost of its original production (running a human being costs a lot of energy). With the advent of computerized information interchange the energy "cost" of reproducing text is ludicrously small. It would seem that the creation of a piece of text has a lasting value. What other fire can a human being light that lasts that long? Or at least has the potential to last that long... Sometimes I fear that text, the written word, is responsible for the downfall of the human race. When language becomes text it is rendered static and thus can become law. It is then hindered from changing appropriately to address the realities at hand. Nevertheless it is the highest technology human beings have achieved and I can't resist tinkering with it.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
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