Around four thousand years ago humans started working out how to express their verbal thoughts in written language. As far as I know, there is not, as yet, any good way to know the details of how this transition played out. Parts of it were quite gradual — as in the slow transformation of markings that started as notations on traded goods up and down the Yangtze River by merchants and traders with no verbal language in common.<\/p>\n
But other parts of it might have been quite abrupt, occurring over just a few generations, or perhaps springing from the mind and hand of a single exceptional individual. When those abrupt transitions happened, some people must have suddenly realized the ability of the written word to fold time and space itself. For the first time an individual could send their thoughts across vast distances, could learn from the words of one already dead, or conversely, could speak to generations yet unborn.<\/p>\n
I wonder whether there was a sense of dislocation, like that experienced by the first generation to encounter the telephone, or to see reality move upon a flickering movie screen, or to hold a long distance phone conversation from a mountaintop.<\/p>\n
It’s a shame we can’t see what it felt like to witness the beginning of the written word — the greatest leap into virtual reality in all of human history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Around four thousand years ago humans started working out how to express their verbal thoughts in written language. As far as I know, there is not, as yet, any good way to know the details of how this transition played out. Parts of it were quite gradual — as in the slow transformation of markings … Continue reading “Virtual reality, old-style”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6977"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6977"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6978,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6977\/revisions\/6978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}