Historians agree that one of the oldest writing forms still available are the clay tablets of the ancient Samarians and ever since people have been recording their history, scientific knowledge, and stories. This educating ourselves by reading continued up to the late 19th century when moving pictures were perfected by Thomas Edison, even then printed narratives and dialogs were included. Radio and the “Talkies” gave the beginnings of “Mass-Medea” a voice.
I might be telling on myself, but I attended private schools and Universities. One thing that was not readily available to me was TV, and radio on a daily bases. Now-a-days it seems that TV, video-games, and the inter-net is as vital as breathing to our youth. It would seem to me that we are sliding back into an age of vocal storytelling, and of that age of Homer, what do we have left? What we have is what was recorded in writing by those ancient ones that chose to write the stories down centuries after Homer. If they had not recorded the oral stories of Homer they would have been lost to time.
How important is the written word? If a governing body want to attempt to control what people think and intellectual thinking they Ban Books or Burn them. The first Emperor of China did just that and many others including the Nazi Party under Hitler in Germany. Censorship in any form is mind control. The concept is “He who controls the press controls the masses”, (Quote Unknown).
To explain why the written word is held in such regard as to be a danger to some and gold to others, consider this; reading involves several mental operations, sight, contemplation, memory, and imagination. Chemically speaking reading anything sets the brain glowing, (On Fire) forming mental images to aid in the understanding of what is read, and if a written concept is studied it will be an enduring concept. Written enduring concepts have changed the world.
We the people have gone from stone aged hunter-gathers to walking on the moon and reaching out to the stars by education through reading written enduring concepts, and building on the written thoughts and findings of others be it science theory, or even science fiction, and stories. All of this written material is us, the story of us.
For our progeny to gain a fully developed understanding of their world and its future possibilities, instead of compressed visual representations out of someone’s imagination they need to read the books that those enduring concept and visual representations of someone’s imagination came from for themselves.
