I’m as keen as the next geek about the possibilities that the net brings, but a monoculture? Not so fast.

Proponents of this idea say that the Internet has brought about extreme, unprecedented and revolutionary change. Let’s look at the merits of the argument as it relates to different elements of the Internet.

Email was one of the first parts of the Internet that most people started using. But email isn’t a paradigm shift; it takes the concept of a physical postal service and physical, written letters, and digitizes it.

So what’s revolutionary about email? Well, if I wanted to write a letter to my mother and mail it, that’s easy enough to do. Email is faster and cheaper.

But modern postal services are cheaper and faster than their predecessors. So this is progress, not revolution.

If I wanted to copy my sister on that letter that’s also easy. Yes, it’s twice as expensive, but it’s not that hard. Email makes it easier and less expensive to send a “carbon copy” than in the original medium. (The term “carbon copy” is another hangover from the “mail” paradigm.)

If I wanted to spam a huge number of people with printed material my main obstacle would be monetary, but it’s not difficult at all to do. In fact, postal services will help me do it. Of course, they don’t call it spam. They call it direct marketing. It’s relatively expensive and ironically is one of the only things that is keeping traditional postal services afloat. And it is here that we find one of the only meaningful differences between mail and email. Email democratizes spam by making it virtually free.

Score one for the Nigerian businessman.

How could we regard email as revolutionary when it brings with it even the least desirable elements of physical mail? My reading on this: no paradigm shift, no revolution.

Well, how about the blog? Isn’t it unique and fantastic that this brave new world exists? There’s no precedent at all, is there?

Yes there is. It’s called the pamphlet.

Back in Victorian London there were some 150 regular publications, ranging from daily to weekly. Many were small periodicals that were fairly cheap to produce, and many had an unapologetic bias. In short, these were the blogs of the day. Anyone with a few shillings to rub together could at least publish a pamphlet.

True, the Internet has made it cheaper and easier to put your own writing in the public view. Just as email has made spamming much easier and cheaper for us all. But I’m still waiting for the revolution.

You want a paradigm shift? You want a technology that transforms every society it touches?

It’s writing.

Writing developed independently at most three times in the history of the world. It originated independently in the Middle East and in Mesoamerica, the latter in a nascent form that was ultimately snuffed out by the vagaries of history.

Some scholars argue that the Chinese developed writing independently of the Middle East.

Some suggest that Chinese ideograms are so conceptually different from alphabetic systems that it must have a separate origin. Others say that the sheer distance from Mesopotamia to China makes a separate origin likely.

To both I say no, for one primary reason: it is not how things are written, but that things can be written, that is the revolution.

So it doesn’t matter how the idea is adopted, only that is adopted by people who see its inherent power and potential. And we have consistently seen, throughout history, that non-literate peoples eagerly adopt writing when they encounter it.

Have you ever seen this? This is the Cherokee syllabary. It was developed by the Cherokee leader Sequoyah in the years surrounding 1820.

Having been introduced to the concept or writing and having seen its obvious power and benefits, he wanted his own people to have that benefit. So he created a writing system for the Cherokee language that was inspired by the Latin script used by the Europeans, the only precedent of which he was aware.

(A syllabary is different from an alphabet. In an alphabet, symbols represent single sounds that may not be usable on their own, like ‘t’ or ‘u’. A syllabary gives a separate symbol to each syllable in a language. For that reason, syllabaries often contain many more symbols than alphabets. In some ways Japanese script constitutes a syllabary.)

The point is, writing is such a powerful technology that any people who were ever even made aware of it could see its evident power and desire it. Greek missionaries to the Russians and Ukrainians over a thousand years ago claimed to have “civilized” the Slavs by giving them a script based on Greek but modified to accommodate their languages. Thus Cyrillic script was born.

So St. Cyril claimed to have civilized the Rus, among others. Let’s go back to Sequoyah for a moment.

When he created the Cherokee syllabary his people were surrounded by increasingly powerful Europeans. He could see what was happening. He knew what had already happened to other First Nations. He knew that his people would be have to adapt in order to survive. And adopting literacy was a crucial component.

The Cherokee syllabary was a part of a larger effort that included his people adopting European styles of dress, settling into villages that had structures similar to American buildings, including churches, where Cherokee people, who had been encouraged by their own leaders to covert to Christianity, attended Sunday services.

As we know, these efforts ended up being for naught: when the Americans decided that they wanted their land in any case, the Cherokee were driven out on the Trail of Tears, beginning with the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Given these facts, among many others, one may ask where civilization lies. Not necessarily with literacy, when those who have it behave worse than those who aspire to it.

So powerful and pervasive is writing that we almost never consider that it is a technology. It is like the air we breathe. (Douglas Hofstadter has pointed out that many literate people are basically unaware that there are two forms of both the lowercase “a” and “g.” We read, we write, we breathe.)

But it is literacy, the horrors of the Trail of Tears notwithstanding, that makes modern civilization possible.

A final word in the supposed monoculture that the Internet is creating. I believe I’ve successfully put some cold water on email and blogs. They are not transformative. Writing is now a near-universal technology, available to all but a tiny number of human cultures, and even making tentative inroads into other species, but nobody would ever suggest that the worldwide use of writing has created a global culture.

During the uprisings in Egypt that were one of the most dramatic parts of the Arab Spring, much was made of the importance of social media, particularly Facebook, in helping to organize the very impressive demonstrations in Tahrir Square.

Monoculture proponents will say things like: “There are half a billion people using Facebook. Egyptians use it just like us. Wow! It’s a global culture!”

Nonsense. I have a few more than four hundred Facebook friends, and none of them helped organize any part of the Arab Spring. If there are 500 million Facebook users, then there are in fact 500 million Facebooks, which no more creates a global monoculture than does the presence of 500 million pieces of paper and pens on 500 million desks. To say that Facebook, or any other social media, or any other part of the internet somehow creates profoundly new interconnections between you and me is not different than saying that because I can write something on a piece of paper that you will never read, and that you can do the converse, we must be intimately connected.

The true connection is the fact of our shared, but separate, literacy, and the influence it has had on my, and your, humanity. And that begins with language, which is a whole other story.

Surely it warmed Mark Zuckerberg’s heart to see his name on placards in demonstrations in Cairo. It is impressive. I can only think that Gutenberg would have been similarly heartened that his invention had made widespread literacy possible.

But Gutenberg likely would have not confused the widespread publication of books and the worldwide increase in literacy with the establishment of a new global culture. Literacy, as it spread, created as much of a Babel as anything else, with many hundreds of different writing systems, differing in technique, style and even underlying concept, one often opaque to another.

As we have seen with Sequoyah, often the way that a culture will attempt to raise itself up is by developing its own, unique writing system. Japanese katakana distinguishes itself from the Chinese-derived kanji. Korean hangul gave the Koreans their own writing system, again, free from the cultural domination implied by the Korean use of Chinese script.

The Serbs and the Croats speak essentially the same language—Serbo-Croatian—but the Serbs write in Cyrillic, the Croats, with a Latin script. The more nationalist on either side have at times been resistant to the idea that they share a language at all.

The modern invention of a written form of Inuktitut has given the Inuit a certain liberation, as they no longer have to use an alphabet that can really only be associated with the near-destruction of their language, culture and lives.

And in China there was a separate form of writing that was the exclusive, and carefully guarded, secret of women.

So, again, it is writing that is the transformative, and liberating, technology.

The Internet is merely its most advanced and powerful vessel.

It pains me to admit that my own home, while it is a “Thing I Love,” is likely shaping its inhabitants a little differently. Small, rather messy, with second-hand everything (nearly) and nowhere near adequate storage space, our home is problematic. It is all very well and good to cite that other bit of chiasmus—”A place for everything and everything in its place”—but what do you do when there are too many everythings and not enough places?

In our home—as in many others, I suspect—the kitchen is the centre of everything. The kitchen table is where everything starts and ends. This poor overworked table is forced to multitask as a desk, food prep area, meeting area, kitchen table (natch), shop table, and, most unfortunately, short term storage for all of the everythings that do not yet have places.

Of course, stuff that gets moved from storage on the kitchen table to make way for plates, food, newspapers or school projects inevitably finds itself on other nearby horizontal surfaces: the kitchen counter, the floor….

Which is why I have declared a quiet war on my home. Every day I endeavour to throw a few things out. Our coffee table, which I garbage-picked and thought was quite nice, is now groaning under its weight of miscellaneous stuff. If it were smaller, there’d be less stuff on it. So it’s got to go.

The really unfortunate thing here is that a lot of the “stuff” would have been saleable only a few years ago. Who wants my stereo cabinet? It’s really quite nice. A little outsized for an iPod dock, but maybe you’re going for that retro-irony thing. If you want it, it’ll be on our front lawn fairly soon.

Stay tuned for more.

This website is the long-overdue reboot of my own personal website, which I put together in about half a day. I have designed lots of sites for lots of people, but neglected my own. As they saying goes:

A Cobbler Is Not A Cobbler To Mend His Own Shoes.

I can design a site for you too. Just drop me a line. These days I generally use WordPress, which is a dream to work with and a cinch to keep updated.