What will be changed when we can encode and decode spaces as we do language? More importantly, what will be changed when space can encode and decode itself as we do with thought and language?
What is enabled by computers manipulating spatial data as we to text?
Writing Restructures Consciousness:
Ong describes the essential challenges of writing: “To make yourself clear without gesture, without facial expression, without intonation, without a real hearer, you have to foresee circumspectly all possible meanings a statement may have for any possible reader in any possible situation, and you have to make your language work so as to come clear all by itself, with no existential context.” he writes. “The need for this exquisite circumspection makes writing the agonizing work it commonly is.”
Ong’s definition of a functionally literate human beings: beings whose thought processes do not grow out of simply natural powers but out of these powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of writing. Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.
“Technologies are not mere exterior aids, but also interior transformations of consciousness….”