Seth’s title: “Hebrew and Aramaic as Semiotic Technologies: Toward an Ethnography of Early Alphabetic Writing” [Abstract]

We aren’t determined by our technology. What does shape us? If we’ve always already been virtual and involved in making worlds, what is new about digital genres? How does newness enter the world? Seth is going to look at how the alphabet began.

The alphabet was invented around 2,000BC. It contained about 30 consonants. What was the effect of the alphabet on the development of Western thought. Seth’s old advisor, Cross, said that the link was ironclad. Static societies gave way to “alphabetic” societies. Because the alphabet is easily learned, literacy is democratized, encouraging challenges to authority.

But, says Seth, Cross underestimated the difficulty of learning the alphabet. It takes years, not months. And it seems not to have changed practice all that much. For example, documents were originally authenticated by writing in a list of witnesses, but for an extra layer of security, people could use stamp seals, a preliterate practice. Further, the new literacy seems not to have affected the practices of Socratic Greece. For example, plots of land were marked by rocks, not by recording deeds of any sort.

So does “semiotic technology” have nothing to do with the development of culture? No, it has something, but you need a fine-grained investigation. The first signatures weren’t in alphabetic writing. Thus, the signing system is tied to the medium (handwriting on papyrus, thumbnail imprints in clay), not to the writing system.

We need to look to ideology, practice and medium to see how the new arises, not simply to the nature of the semiotic technology (i.e., the arise of the alphabet in Seth’s example).

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