17.4: After Writing?

If the invention or adoption of writing is a ‘point of no return’, like agriculture or urbanism, is a time ‘after writing’ conceivable? The chaîne opératoire for the production of this particular text sketched at its beginning worked until the late 19^th century, when sound recording became possible in a recognisable form for the first time (Gelatt 1977: 17–82; Milner 2009: 29–49); in the early 21^st century it is now possible to make sound permanent. Just as the introduction of the alphabet has been implicated in the transformation of ‘Homeric’ oral poetry (e.g. Powell 1991), so has the introduction of recording machinery to record not just the words, but the very sound of Yugoslav bards (even their visual performance: see the CD insert to Lord 2000). The ‘permanence’ of the modern world, however, is digital permanence (as Pye, this volume, reminds us), because all data — visual (including writing and image) and aural — are encoded in the same manner, using 0s and 1s, the only limitations being the amount of physical storage available and the resolution at which sound and image can be sampled at ‘recording’ and later (dis)played. Convergence is the key word: not only are all these media encoded in the same raw material, but our devices for recording and playing back are identical too: it is possible to use your digital tablet to write, capture images and sounds, even to paint (e.g. Grant 2010). This does seem to represent a Gutenberg moment, although it will take some time for future generations to appreciate it — just as it has taken us millennia to be in a position to appreciate writing in some of the many diverse material manifestations, themselves implicated in particular historical circumstances, explored in this stimulating volume. It is perhaps ironic that modern terminology gives us the appearance of coming full-circle (Figure 2a–b): from early cuneiform tablets to 21^st-century ‘tablets’?