from the desk of H. Bowie...

desktop with typewriter

Essays:

The Written Word in the 21st Century

Words Have Power (written on typewriter)
image credit: iStock/Michail_Petrov-96

Whether we are talking about the King James Bible, The Catcher in the Rye, On the Origin of Species, or Wikipedia, we can recognize that writing things down is an important means of preserving human knowledge and wisdom, and that both writing and reading are invaluable human activities.

Author Carl Sagan made a compelling case for the importance of the written word in his own book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, calling it “the great invention”:

For 99 percent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except for firsthand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth. As in the children’s game “Telephone,” over tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be distorted and lost.

Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate – with the best teachers – the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses.

Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.

How the Practical Utopian is Different

Since these points might not otherwise be obvious, let me just take a few moments to list the ways in which I’m doing all I can to buck these trends at Practopian.org.

  1. No advertising.
  2. No paywalls or fees.
  3. No pop-ups asking you to subscribe to anything.
  4. No cookies or tracking of your personal information.
  5. Permissive copyright, under the terms of this Creative Commons license, allowing anyone to share and adapt my content, so long as they provide attribution, and publish their own works under the same liberal terms.
  6. Challenging material: I want you to be smarter after reading my stuff. I won’t talk down to you.
  7. Quotations from a host of worthwhile authors, almost always with references to the books or other sources from which the words were taken.
  8. Minimal use of social media: if you’d like to keep up with what I’m doing, the best ways are to regularly visit the website, subscribe to my old-school RSS feed, follow me on Twitter, or sign up for our email publication, which comes out every week or two.
  9. Deep site organization: Sure, the front page shows you the latest additions to the site. And I have different types of content, for different purposes. But material is also carefully organized around a number of big ideas, ideas that run throughout all of my writing and the quotations I’ve collected.

In general, here at Practopian.org, I’m trying to present meaningful, educational content with all the benefits of a traditional book, while adding some valuable advantages available with the Web: low-cost publishing, easy updates, and a tiered organization to the materials, starting shallow, and then proceeding gradually to deeper treatments of important topics.

What We Can All Do

Not wanting to encourage simple gnashing of teeth, or to merely plug my own work here at The Practical Utopian, let me conclude by suggesting a few concrete things you can do to help buck these same trends.

  • Provide financial support to organizations that supply you with words worth reading, starting with Wikipedia, and continuing with your most trusted newspapers and magazines.
  • Support your local independent bookstore. I use Amazon all the time, but I also make a point of stopping by my local bookstore every once in a while and purchasing a book there.
  • Support your local public library and your librarians.
  • Read something new and challenging. At least “new to you”.
  • Support organizations like Page Ahead that provide books to children in need.

If you think you can’t afford to provide financial support to these sorts of organizations, then remember the words of Desiderius Erasmus, who wrote to a friend in 1500, saying:

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

November 12, 2018