8th
Havelock claims that the concept of information came with literacy. Specifcally, the greek alphabet with ‘properly’ distinguished vowels and consonants.
The language of Homer is a storage language devised orally for the purpose of survival.
Devising a spoken language for this purpose for contemporary Greeks was one thing; devising a means for transmitting its record was something else—a task undertaken by the Greek alphabet. This same instrument has made possible the formation of those concepts of information, of code, of cultural storage, by which oralism itself is to be judged. (Havelock, *The Muse Learns to Write*, 59)
A communication system of this sort is an echo system, light as air and as fleeting. Yet we are given to describing its character and effects as though they were some kind of material existing in some kind of space. They become “patterns” and “codes” and “themes” and “monumental compositions.” They have “content” and “substance.” Their behavior becomes, libguistically speaking, a matter of “grammar,” a term which by its very defintionbetwrays the source of its intervetnion in the behavior of words as written, not spoken. Its rules are said to be “imprinted” on our brains. If preserved, it beomces “infromation,” which is “packaged” and “stored” in the warehouse of the mind. (66)
In primary orality, the oral specialist, whether bard, priest, prophet, or seer, continually colethes his memorizable instruction in designs that are contrived to please; so that the instruction itelf is fastened on the social memory by indirection, as it is translated into active examples. It should be noted that the examples which tend to predominate are in fact those in which the instruction fails to be carried out: the action that supervenes becomes “heroic” or “tragic” (or in teh Hebrew case “sinful”) but no less effective as a warning as it preserves and conserves the underlying “lesson.”
Tradition, in short, is taught by action, not by idea or principle. (77)
