Human Communication Has Always Been Technological, Not Biological
Language is as intrinsic to the human experience as many of our biological functions, and yet it is our own creation. That is strange.
That we speak and write words to communicate is so fundamental to who we are that we can easily take for granted how possible some other way could have been. Depending upon your worldview, writing could look like a biologically determined evolutionary step — the inexorable leveling-up of a sufficiently complex organism — or a miracle.
After all, it is possible that we could have evolved to communicate and store knowledge in other ways. We, like many species, could have stored generational knowledge genetically — situationally amending our biological code in real time — and evolved to have a more voluntary control over retrieval of that information. Or, like trees, we could have developed a symbiotic relationship with fungi to establish a network through which we communicate and feel — literally — the experience of one another. We could chat with one another using sonic languages, or solely the movement of our bodies, or depend upon group interactions to create and disseminate meaning. Alternatives are plentiful among the animal kingdom. And though our evolution is considered to be superior to our planet-mates, that also is not obvious nor an objective fact. We don’t know how the dolphins see things.
Words seem to be a choice. Or, perhaps more specifically, the outworking of a pattern common to the human brain — one where expediency and iteration define one-way paths for us. If that sounds like a technological narrative, it is because that’s exactly what it is. It may not sound especially challenging to say that text is a technology, but the more accurate statement is to say that words themselves — languages, even — are a technology.
