Fry's Planet Word (2011–…): Season 1, Episode 4 - Spreading the Word - full transcript
'Language is one of the most
amazing things that we humans do.
'It separates us from the animals,
'gives us theatre, poetry and songs.
'It shapes our identity
and allows us to express emotions.'
'It makes us laugh.
It makes us cry.'
'It allows us to record our
histories and imagine our futures.'
Oh, my goodness! This is magical.
In this programme,
I'm going to explore
language's physical incarnation,
our greatest invention - writing.
Since its birth 5,000 years ago,
the written word has given us
civilisation and technology.
I'm going to reveal how it's
transformed the way we interpret
and explore our world,
how we organise our religions
and governments
and how we spread our ideas
and our laws.
How writing allows us
to listen to the past
and to speak to the future.
But is writing here to stay,
or is it just a flash in the pen?
'Learning to talk,
like learning to walk,
'is a natural part of growing up.
'It's something that children
the world over do instinctively.'
'But while spoken language
'is an innate part of
the human operating system,
'something we've been doing
for maybe only 50,000 years,
'the ability to read and write
is an optional extra.'
Reading and writing are not
a natural state of affairs.
It's just something
that's been invented
to complement utterance -
spoken human language.
In fact, it's not necessary or
essential for communication at all,
and there are hundreds
of societies around the world
which have existed for centuries,
perfectly happily,
without feeling the need
to write down their language.
The Akha, here in North Thailand,
is one such.
'While anthropologists might
attribute the lack of writing
'to the culture's
self-sufficient economy,
'the Akha have their own story.
'According to myth,
'they were given writing
by the first spirit,
'Un Ma, on a buffalo hide.
'But the Akha don't have
a written language now,
'so what on earth happened?'
It was written down on buffalo skin?
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Oh, right! Cos of the meat.
They ate it up!
So, the guardians of
the Akha alphabet ate up...
I see.
Since those days, we don't have...
- Since then, you rely on your memory.
- Yes.
'Traditionally,
the Akha keep in their heads
'and pass on verbally,
all their culture -
'their myths, stories
and their entire history,
'all the way back to
their founding father, their Adam.'
And so, that's all in your head?
How many generations?
Do you learn songs, as well?
'Aju, like the rest
of the literate world,
'now uses writing rather than
his brain to remember things.
'Rather than fight progress, he wants the
next generation to learn to read and write,
'so they can preserve
their culture on the page.
'Reading and writing will give them
access not just to their past,
'but to that of the rest
of the world.'
'Writing lets us discover things
'about cultures
far away in space and time.
'And some of the oldest writing
is here, at the British Museum.
'So, how and why did it start?'
The British Museum has thousands
of objects with writing on them,
some of them more than
five millennia old.
It's a matter of intense debate
amongst the curators
of the various departments here
as to who has the oldest.
The Egyptologists claim
that they have the edge,
while the Assyriologists,
they maintain that their form -
cuneiform writing - is the oldest.
Either way, it seems that writing
was not invented
for the purposes of writing
love poems or novels or prayers,
but actually
for the rather more mundane purpose
of taxation and accountancy.
'As societies grew and flourished
in the cradle of civilisation,
'today's Iraq, so did the need for
bureaucracy and record-keeping.
'Who owes what to whom?
'This early clay tablet records
the payment of workers in beer.'
'Behind the scenes at the museum,
'Dr Irving Finkel, Keeper of
the Department of Assyriology,
'is giving some students a lesson
'in writing cuneiform
the traditional way -
'on a piece of clay, with a reed.
'I'm attempting to write my name.'
So, an upright like that and then...
..that and that. Sort of more...
Not quite. It's a bit too big.
- Well, it's assertive.
- Yeah, it is.
And then, one upright.
'The first teachers of writing
used to beat their students.
'I hope Dr Finkel doesn't subscribe
to such violent methods.'
Stephen, as you know,
cuneiform writing
is the oldest form of writing
in the history of the world.
- I knew that. - Don't let anybody
dissuade you of any other truth.
It began in ancient Iraq
and various remarkable things
have to be stressed.
Firstly, that the people
who invented writing
had no idea what was
going to be the consequence.
They did it for local,
bureaucratic reasons -
they had to keep books and accounts
on incoming and outgoing goods.
That's how it all began.
Nobody had a vision of
giving writing to the world.
That it was going to end up
with Shakespeare and Proust
- and Barbara Cartland.
- Precisely.
But once it started in the world,
it never stopped.
And like a snowball,
it grew and grew and grew,
until it's become the kind of
intellectual prop of homo sapiens.
So, it's a very significant thing.
In our department to do with
Ancient Mesopotamia,
we have the earliest evidence.
So, what I brought firstly
to show you is a real tablet.
This was written by
a schoolboy in about 1700 BC.
- Good Lord! - The most wonderful thing
is there is one example of this.
A tablet like this - on the back,
there is a caricature of the teacher
and this teacher has
a goofy kind of tooth
and a stupid expression on his face
and this is clearly a pupil
who is fed up to his back teeth.
- So, this is his rough book,
his exercise book? - Yeah.
In my view, there's something
really important to be learned,
which is, the human beings
who made these things
are absolutely close to us.
There are voices singing out
of these apparently dead objects.
Exactly.
The dazzling wonder
of the human mind,
as we know it today, forcefully,
in my view, is there to be
plucked out of these documents.
'Of course, cuneiform wasn't just
used to write bills and accounts.
'In no time at all,
people started writing poems,
'love letters and legends.
'Written stories,
like the Epic Of Gilgamesh
'give us a glimpse
into a different world.
'A world where writing itself
was a source of power.
'Writing allowed rulers
to lay down the first laws,
'send secret messages in battles
'and write their own versions
of events.
'Only a few highly trained scribes
'could read and write
this complex script,
'but in doing so, they took humans
from prehistoric times
'into the pages of history.'
Writing was developed separately
and independently all over the world
and by 1200 BC,
it was flourishing in India,
China, Europe and Egypt.
Now, while some ancient scripts
have yet to be deciphered
even to this day,
the language of the pharaohs,
hieroglyphs,
has been successfully translated
and transcribed
thanks to the Rosetta Stone.
'The same inscription on this stone
is written three times,
'in Ancient Greek,
Egyptian Demotic script
'and the original
Egyptian hieroglyphs.
'These three scripts
allowed hieroglyphs
'finally to be deciphered.'
The phrase "Rosetta Stone"
has become a kind of metaphor
for anything that is a key part
in the process of decoding,
translating
or solving a difficult problem.
But all written language
is a form of code
and without the ability to read,
it just becomes as incomprehensible
as the marks on this rock are,
to me, at least.
You probably learnt to
read and write as I did,
by using letter tiles,
or you had those sort of
strips of paper
round your primary school classroom
with A for apple and B for bear and
C for carthorse, or whatever it was.
The amazing thing about
the system of an alphabet
is you don't have learn symbols,
you just learn these individual
letters that make the sounds.
Once you do, anything is possible.
You can just make up all kinds of
fantastic phrases.
I adore playing with... Oh, look.
Look what we can have here.
Playing with letters and words.
The alphabet allowed
what you might call
a democratisation
of reading and writing.
And the alphabet that we use
came to use via the Romans,
from that great,
democratic civilisation,
Ancient Greece.
'The Greeks were famous
for epic stories.
'Homer's Iliad
and Odyssey told tales
'of wars and adventures
all around the Mediterranean.
'But Homer himself didn't write.'
Some romantically-minded scholars
have proposed that a brilliant
contemporary of Homer
invented the alphabet in order
to record the poet's oral epics,
The Iliad and The Odyssey.
It seems unlikely, but Homer himself
does give us a clue
as to the origins of writing.
In The Iliad and The Odyssey,
he mentions the Phoenicians,
traders who travelled
the Mediterranean in ships.
'The Phoenicians were
the great merchants of antiquity
'with ports in modern day Syria,
Lebanon and Israel,
'and all over the Mediterranean.
'But they didn't just
transport goods.
'They introduced
a whole new way of writing -
'the alphabet.
'Theirs was the mother
of all alphabets,
'including our own.'
You're an extraordinarily
accomplished fellow.
You don't just dig around in sites,
you actually can write Phoenician.
- Maybe you can show me the alphabet?
- Aboslutely.
Give me a sense of how it looks.
- Ah, you've got a...
- Yeah.
So, just for example,
the letter Aleph in Proto-Canaanite
or Canaanite script,
it was in the shape
of a head of an ox.
Sorry for my drawing. Fair enough.
But later,
it was transformed in Phoenician,
early Phoenician, into something like
this, which is the shape...
And, of course, if you transform it
in the right direction... Yeah.
..you get the Alpha or the A
or other languages.
In later Phoenician inscription,
was this symbol,
sometimes it even had a small iris.
So, basically, it was transformed
into the Omicron,
the little O.
'For the Phoenicians, the more
people who could read and write,
'the better.
'The alphabet allowed them
to communicate
'and deal more effectively
with foreign trading partners.
'Spreading the word
made sound economic sense.'
The important point about
the Phoenician culture
is that, being a trading culture,
it wasn't interested in leaving
permanent religious memorials in writing,
it was more about
taking writing around
as a way of facilitating the trade
that was the basis of their...
Therefore, they got such a bad press
because in the Bible,
they are the bringer of foreign,
idolatrous, er, cults.
The foreign idols - Jezebel
the queen, the Phoenician queen.
So, these people have
never written history,
but they got all the bad press
from everybody.
They wrote the records,
but they don't survive.
It's very likely.
It's very likely that much
was on papyrus and was lost.
'Papyrus, like the alphabet,
was another Phoenician export.
'We get our word "paper" from it.
'The Greeks gave a collection
of papyrus a new name - byblos,
'from which we get our word "Bible".
' "God, in mysterious Sinai's
awful cave
' "To man the wondrous art
of writing gave",
'wrote Blake in his book Jerusalem.
'Writing allowed the priests
and the rabbis
'to set in stone their beliefs.
'Once written,
customs became religious laws
'and the word of God
could not be edited.
'Writing has allowed one religion,
Judaism,
'to last virtually unchanged
for millennia.'
Behind me is
the Western or Wailing Wall,
one of the most sacred places
in all Judaism.
The written word is integral
to worship here.
Observant Jewish men
have strips of paper
with words from Deuteronomy
and Exodus on them
and these are carried in little
boxes here called phylacteries,
which they have strapped to
their head and to their left arm
as they pray.
Other worshippers write down prayers
to God on scraps of paper
and push them into the cracks
and crevices of the wall behind,
and it's forbidden to remove them.
Twice a year, the rabbi of the Wall
takes them and buries them
in the Mount of Olives.
It's as if the writing
itself is sacrosanct
and imbued with a special power,
and when talking about
the power of words in religion
you absolutely cannot ignore Islam.
Just behind the Western Wall,
yards from it,
is the Dome of the Rock, the third
holiest site in Sunni Islam.
It's covered in writings,
in inscriptions from
the Islamic holy book, the Koran,
and for Islam the Arabic script
is more than just
a writing system invented by man -
it's a gift from God.
In fact, one of the sayings
of the prophet is that
the ink of a scholar is holier
than the blood of a martyr.
Now, it may be that the Arabic
script plays second fiddle to Hebrew
here in Israel, but on the world
stage it's a very different story
and in fact Arabic script is second only
to our own Roman alphabet for use.
The spread of religion
and the spread of writing
have gone hand-in-hand,
and, with writing
so fundamental to faith,
it's not surprising that
people go to such lengths
to protect and preserve
the written words of their gods.
Here in Jerusalem there's
the aptly named Shrine Of The Book,
where some of the most precious
religious writings are on display,
but even in these special and carefully
climate-controlled conditions,
some of the older texts are in
danger of being lost to us forever.
The most famous documents displayed
here are the dead Sea Scrolls,
fragments of biblical texts and religious
writings from the time of Christ.
The scrolls lay hidden
for nearly two millennia,
until a Bedouin shepherd
stumbled upon them in 1946.
They are believed
to be the discovery
of the 20th century.
We are talking about a corpus
of over 900 manuscripts,
comprising all of the books
of the Bible.
These are the oldest copies of the
Bible that we have, 2,000 years old.
These ancient texts are so fragile
that only four
highly trained researchers from
the Israel antiquities authority
are allowed
actually to handle them.
What Lynn is going to show you now
is a sample of the book of Psalms.
Oh, goodness! That's
the real thing, isn't it? Yes.
You're looking at it upside down,
but this is...
It might as well be
upside down to me,
but if you want to turn it
round the right way!
We have about six such plates,
six such pieces,
and we keep them as they were found.
If you look closely here,
even if you can't read Hebrew,
every place the name of God
is written exactly, the yodh, Yahweh,
it is written in what
we call Paleo-Hebrew,
which is the Hebrew of
first Temple times.
So, an ancient Hebrew,
and older Hebrew.
And that's God, God, God,
every time,
- and there's quite a lot of him,
obviously. - Yes.
- He features quite highly.
- Right. Please don't touch.
- Sorry, I was touching the glass,
wasn't I? - Yes.
'These documents are so precious that
even touching the glass is forbidden,
'and the next scroll is all about
rules and regulations.
'It's the Ten Commandments.'
This is the only copy that contains
all of the Ten Commandments.
Oh, my goodness!
Is this the oldest record
of the Ten Commandments?
- This is the oldest record of
the Ten Commandments. - Wow, amazing.
So, that alone would be
the most priceless...
- document, isn't it?
- Right, right. - Amazing.
Every child or every grown-up,
when you say the Ten Commandments,
knows what you're talking about.
And breaks one of them every day!
And breaks one of them every day,
and these are 2,000 years old.
That is extraordinary,
extraordinary.
'These ancient words
are now being protected
'with space age technology -
spectral imaging.
'By photographing the scrolls under
different wavelengths of light,
'new sections of the text
are made visible.'
Oh, yes. It's even becoming clear
in the dark...
Goodness me.
'Once digitised, all 900 fragments
of the scrolls will be
'made available online to scholars
and members of the public.'
Fantastic.
Isn't it wonderful to think
something so old,
so - I won't say primitive -
but the dawn of writing
and everything,
is dependent on our age of the most
extraordinary technological advances
in order to preserve it?
It's rather splendid,
the old meeting new like that.
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Yes, writing utterly changed
the human world.
With writing we could preserve
our myths, our stories and our laws.
The alphabet, whether Phoenician,
Hebrew, Arabic, Greek or Roman,
allowed more and more people
to read and write,
but there was yet to come another
major revolution in writing
that would spread the word
further than ever -
printing.
'Now, you might think that printing
started in Europe in 1450
'with Johannes Gutenberg,
'but this revolutionary technology -
like gunpowder, the compass
'and papermaking - was invented
in China nearly 400 years earlier.'
Hi, hello. I'm Stephen, Stephen Fry.
Nice to see you.
Can you make me one of these chops,
with my name?
'Once carved, block printing
is much quicker
'than handwriting
each complex character,
'but there's a reason why printing
didn't take off in China,
'and that is the sheer volume
of characters -
'literally thousands of them.'
Chinese is one of the oldest
written languages in the world,
and we all know these extraordinary
characters or ideograms,
they're familiar
almost as works of art.
To the Chinese, they are the start
of a lifelong learning process,
because you have to learn each one,
each one has a particular meaning.
And the key difference
between Chinese
and almost all the other languages
of the world, certainly ours,
is that there's no hint
as to how you say them.
What's that like? Well, behind me
you can see the number 60.
That doesn't tell you to say "sixty"
if you're English you say "sixty",
if you're French you say "soixante",
if you're German you'd
say "sechzig", and so on.
It's a symbol.
Imagine that all the numbers from
0 to 2,000 had a separate symbol.
You'd have to learn them all, and
there's no hint how to say them.
'Unlike most other writing systems,
'which phonetically
use symbols or letters
'to represent the sounds
that make up words,
'Chinese characters, or logograms,
represent whole words.
'I'm given a cursory lesson in
how to write this complex script
'by entrepreneur philanthropist
extraordinaire Sir David Tang
'and his calligrapher friend,
Johnson.'
Pictograms are basically
little pictures,
and Chinese words
are composed of radicals,
which are the roots
that you use all the time,
the small pictures you use
all the time to compose words.
For example, this word, "moon",
it is a stylised picture of the moon
and this word for "brightness"
is a composite
of two radicals -
the sun and moon.
So it goes on like that.
So, now, the ones I think I know,
I've seen, anyway, is this China?
Oh, look,
I've got one of these brush pens.
I know, I'm doing it wrong,
but basically that.
That will show you up as
a very ill-educated boy,
because the order in which
you do the stroke is critical.
Whenever people see...
My uncle, if he sees me
writing a word in the wrong order,
he would immediately chastise me
and say, "You uneducated boy, don't
you know how to write that character?"
So, the proper way is one stroke,
two stroke, three and four.
There is no other way
of writing this character.
And the strokes are very important,
because that is the way
in which you look up a word.
This word is "wood",
it looks like a tree.
And you add two more...
That's "full of trees".
And you yet add two more,
which makes five...
That's a forest.
Brilliant.
'Traditionally, Chinese children
have had to learn
'the meaning of thousands
of different characters.
'The complexity of Chinese script
meant that
'when the Communist revolution
took place in 1949,
'less than 20% of the population
could read.'
So, Mao Tse-tung, the great leader,
the scary leader of China
for so many years,
decided that he would institute
a new way of rendering Chinese
into a sort of phonetic alphabet,
a romanisation, as it's called.
'The challenge was to represent
the many tones of spoken Mandarin
'with just 26 letters
of the Roman alphabet.
'The system that was adopted
was called pinyin.
'Pinyin allows children to learn
the sounds of words
'and their meanings
via the phonetic Roman alphabet.
'It acts as a stepping stone
'towards learning
the thousands of characters.'
'The man who invented pinyin,
Zhou Youguang, is now 106
'and is hailed as
a national treasure,
'but is incredibly modest
about his achievements.
Is pinyin one of the great
achievements of the revolution,
do you think?
One of the gratest?
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No?
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'At the onset of Mao's revolution,
'literacy rates
were running at 20%.
'Within two decades
that had increased fourfold.'
♪
Was it ever your aim,
or is it now your aim,
for pinyin to take over
from the Chinese character?
♪
'Pinyin has transformed how people
in China use technology.
'A traditional Chinese typewriter
had over 2,000 characters.
'It was slow and unwieldy to use.
'But by using pinyin on computers
and smartphones, people can find
'the right Chinese character without
having them all on a keyboard.'
So, on this phone
I can choose pinyin. Now, if I type,
let's say a word we know, "Beijing".
That one there or that one there
or that one there...
That's the point, that allows you
to use the Roman alphabet
to find the characters,
otherwise it would be impossible.
'So, it is the simplicity
of the alphabet,
'and the ability easily to
rearrange letters,
'that gives it its potency
as a tool for spreading the word.'
Johannes Gutenberg's
great innovation
was to combine the Chinese
invention - block printing -
with typography - the art and technique
of arranging type moveably.
Movable type freed the written
word from the drudgery
of hand-scribing and allowed it
to take flight in printed texts.
There's something magical about
a bound volume of printed text.
I can never forget the moment
I first saw a novel I'd written
that had arrived from the printers.
I put it on the table
and I looked at it
and I lowered my eyes to its level,
I sniffed it, I opened it,
I walked and circled it,
and I simply couldn't believe
that something I had written
could end up
as that magical thing -
bound, printed text, a book.
Printing would, after Gutenberg,
unleash knowledge
and new ways of thinking
that would change everything.
'The city of Norwich
has a long history of printing.
'It was the first town in Britain
to have a provincial newspaper.'
This ivy-clad, willow-lined stretch
of the river Wensum
in the shadow of Norwich Cathedral
was once,
hard to believe as it may be,
the centre of a kind of
Silicon Valley of Europe.
Because here was a thriving
and prosperous printworks,
and that was the industry
that changed the world.
'Now all remains is
the John Jarrold Printing Museum,
'run by retired experts from the
industry. They're going to help me
'type-set a poem written by Chaucer,
'the first English author
to be set in print.'
I believe that England's first
great poet, Geoffrey Chaucer,
would rather have liked
a printing press.
He died just around the time
that Gutenberg was being born,
so he missed the print revolution.
But he certainly gave us indication
that he was rather fed up
with the sloppiness of those who
copied out his works for readers.
In fact, in one of his great poems,
Troilus and Cressida, in the envoi,
the bit where he sends his book
out to the public,
he sort of makes a request
that it isn't too badly mangled.
He says, "For there is
so great diversity in English
"and in writing of our tongue,
"so pray I God that none
miswrite thee, little book."
"Nee the mysmetre
for defaute of tonge
"and read whereso thou be
or else sung,
"that thou be understonde,
"God I beseech. But yet to purpose
of my rather speech."
In other words, he hoped
that people would find some way
of spelling all the different words
at least in such a manner
that it was understood by those
who were going to listen or read it.
And that's what printing allowed.
'I'm going to print Chaucer's envoi
'with the help of typesetter
David Skipper.'
What's the plan?
Well, this is the composing case
with the characters,
capitals and lower case.
Is that why we say upper case
and lower case?
Why you say upper case and lower case
is that the capitals
used to be in the upper case
on the frame,
and the small letters used to be
in the lower case. Of course.
How long did it take to train,
how old were you when you started?
I was 16 when I started.
- So it was a proper apprenticeship?
- And I did five years, yes. - Coo.
So, you pick the character up,
you feel for the space on top
and you put it in the stick.
Oh, I see.
"And for there..." We need
another E, don't we?
Well, I was doing a piece of text
that I saw...
Oh, it's a Chaucerian spelling,
is it?
Of course, so we don't need
another E.
Let's have a look,
what have we got here,
"And for ther is
so gret diversite."
"Is so gret," and "gret"
doesn't have an A in it. No.
Oh, you've memorised it!
'English in the Middle Ages
was incredibly diverse.
'Dialects of different regions had
different words for the same thing,
'and different spellings.
'When Caxton brought the printing
press to Britain in 1476,
'he was faced with a dilemma.
'He couldn't print all the different
arbitrary spellings
'that were spread around
the country.
'By setting words in print,
'Caxton started to make
the English language more stable.'
'And printed books spread these
changes across the country.'
He's hoping that when this poem
goes out in the world
no-one will miscopy it
or miswrite it.
Miswrite, I see, in that sense.
It reminds one
of the World Wide Web, really,
that in 1993 Tim Berners-Lee creates
this new system, the World Wide Web,
for linking text
across different computers,
and within what seems a heartbeat
there are billions of pages
of World Wide Web.
- When things take off, they really do
take off, don't they? - Yes.
And when you ink the type, you do
it diagonally. I noticed that.
Yeah, because it doesn't
push it over so much.
And quite firm,
but not too firm.
And then the other way,
then you get all the corners.
That's enough.
Then you just check that
that's all pushed up like that.
And I'll get a piece of...
Two pieces of card.
I notice you use the yellow paper
to go on top.
That's right, a couple of sheets
just to give a bit of impression.
I see, OK.
Pop your first one on, that's it.
Nice and straight-ish.
- Then that goes on like that?
- That's right. - Just one roll?
One roll, straight across. Ooh!
- Still magical.
- Then carefully lift it off.
And, voila!
That's brilliant!
I think Chaucer
would be thrilled at that.
And it looks like proper printing,
doesn't it? It looks really...
- It is proper printing!
- That's what I mean!
And you can tell!
'With printing, the written word
truly began to spread.
'Printed books, like the Phoenician
alphabet millennia before,
'democratised knowledge.
'Reading was no longer
just an activity for the elite,
'but something that ordinary people
could afford to learn to do.'
Printing didn't just give rise
to greater literacy,
it changed people's very attitude
towards learning and knowledge.
Open enquiry and questioning of
received wisdom greatly increased,
and the booksellers of Paris
have long been part of
a kind of literary underworld,
spreading subversive ideas
by printed pamphlets, books,
leaflets and newspapers.
The printed word fostered a republic
of letters, the age of reason -
the Enlightenment.
'In London, Oxford, Vienna,
Edinburgh, Warsaw and Paris,
'like-minded thinkers congregated
to read as well as to learn from
'and debate with each other
in taverns or coffee houses.
'One of the oldest and most famous
is the Cafe Procope.
'This was the haunt of intellectual
giants like Rousseau, Voltaire,
'Franklin, Jefferson and Diderot.
So it seems like a good place
'to meet Enlightenment scholar
Dr Kate Tunstall and find out about
'the book that embodies
the Enlightenment project -
'Diderot's Encyclopaedia.'
It's an encyclopaedia,
it's an Enlightenment project,
so it's covering human knowledge
in a rational, ordered way,
and presumably the world of man
in letters and music and poetry,
- but also the world of nature
and science? - Yes.
Could Diderot... Was he a master
of those subjects as well?
He was a kind of spider
at the centre of a web,
where he was receiving articles
from all kinds of people.
There were about 140, 150
contributors,
and Diderot receives,
we think, all of these articles
and produces a whole lot of them
himself and needs to coordinate this.
It obviously relied on a man
with an extraordinary mind,
as you say, like a spider in a web,
to control all these lines of thought
and all these cross-disciplines.
Yeah, you can get those things
wrong.
Whereas on the web you can alter
those things as you go,
because it hasn't been printed,
as soon as it's been printed,
if you've forgotten to put the
cross reference in, you're in trouble.
'Diderot's aim for his encyclopaedia
was to assemble
'each and every branch of human
knowledge, creating a volume
'that had the power to change men's
common way of thinking.
'His project was,
in a strictly secular way,
'as ambitious as
the Bible had been.'
So, a really extraordinary
achievement,
and not just a sober
setting in stone of world knowledge,
- but a kind of mischievous...
- Very mischievous.
..undermining of the previous
church, the ecclesiastical world.
- Shall we look something up?
- Oh, do, give me some examples.
I want to tell you my favourite
article, which is,
"Aguaxima, Natural History,"
in brackets afterwards,
"Brazilian plant."
"That's all this article
says about it," I'm quoting.
"And I wonder
who such a description is made for.
"It cannot be for people
who live in the country,
"because they know what aguaxima is
and that it grows in their region.
"It would be as if you'd said to a
Frenchman that pears grow in France.
"It's not for us, either, because
"what do we care that there's
a plant in Brazil called aguaxima?
"This article leaves ignorant people
just as ignorant as they were before.
"It teaches us nothing,
"and so, if I have decided
to mention this plant,
"it's just to indulge certain
kinds of readers who would rather
"find nothing of interest
in an article of a dictionary,
"or indeed something
perfectly stupid,
"than not find the word
in the dictionary at all."
- That's fantastic!
- That's the end of it.
You imagine him late at night
and he's had "agave" or something,
and "Aguaxima,
why should I bother?!
"But now that I've got the slip of paper
that says it's a plant in Brazil,
I can't throw it away,
"I promised to write
an encyclopaedia."
- But he feels it's a bit stupid just
to say "plant in Brazil". - Exactly!
That's a fabulous insight into
of the workings of his mind.
The project to describe all human
knowledge and all sciences,
all crafts in these volumes
is an extraordinary project, yeah.
'Printing led to an accumulation of
knowledge, and new ways of thinking.
'It triggered revolutions in
agriculture, industry and science.
'And we had more and more books.
But what to do with them?
'The answer
was to build more libraries.'
Almost everything I am
I owe to libraries.
When I was a child there were
no great libraries around,
certainly nothing like this,
but we did have this thing called
the mobile library, a van that would
come once a fortnight, I think,
and I would wait for it like a child
waiting for an ice cream van.
And I would get on
and get my supply of books
and they would last me two weeks.
Then when I was older I could get to
Norwich, the local big city,
and I would spend hours and hours
and hours there.
It's like a will o' the wisp,
one book lights another book
which lights another one,
which lights another one.
I suppose libraries still, for me,
have this extraordinary charge.
When I get in one I feel this buzz,
it's almost sexual,
there's something about the...
the fact that behind all these
bound copies, there are voices,
there are people murmuring to you,
seducing you,
dragging you into their world.
These are wonderful, magical places.
I suppose, if I have a campaign
that I'm really behind,
it's that of saving our libraries.
Because everyone surely has the right
to access the voices of the past.
'Although a Cambridge man,
I'm exploring
'one of the oldest and most
impressive libraries in the world -
'Oxford University's library,
the Bodleian.
'No-one, no matter how important,
can actually borrow books
'from this library, and to become
a reader, I have to pledge an oath.'
"I hereby undertake not to remove
from the library
"or to mark, deface
or injure in any way,
"any volume, document
or other object
"belonging to it
or in its custody..."
'The oath was intended to protect
the 11 million books
'and countless priceless manuscripts
that are housed here.'
So here is a fantastic transition
between manuscript and print.
You have hand work
for the illumination
and you have print to print
the main part of the text,
but it's on vellum.
And so to Ferdinand of Naples,
who may well have felt
slightly uneasy
about the new technology of print -
this would have been
much more familiar to him.
'But these days, the library
has another challenge -
'how to stay relevant
in a digital age.
'While the internet has many mundane
uses, from booking holidays
'to doing our weekly grocery shop,
it also has a colossal impact
'on the way we consume words
and knowledge.
'We can access,
almost instantaneously,
'an enormous repository
of information
'at the mere click of a button
or swipe of a finger.'
What marks a great library out
is how the collections are used,
how access is provided,
and the kinds of environments,
both physical and virtual,
that you're able to provide scholars
and, you know, the whole interested
public, with access to information.
This great archive
that we're responsible for.
And the whole library world
is collectively responsible for.
It really needs to be used to be,
you know, meaningful. Yeah.
Will you move,
in the next hundred years,
away from receiving atomic matter?
And will you ask publishers,
instead of providing you
with physical books...?
The process has already begun
and is driven by the publishers.
So there are many publishers
who only publish electronically.
So we have to do
digital preservations.
So you have library shelves, but
do you also have racks of servers?
We certainly do.
We also have staff
whose job it is to keep stuff safe.
To keep the bits alive,
so that scholars in 400 years' time
will be able to access the
information that's been produced now
just as we're able to access information
printed by the great scholars.
Yes, it's a different expertise.
'We're producing and consuming more
and more words in a digital form.
'But do our technological advances
mean that the printed version
'of the book will become as moribund
as the clay cuneiform tablet?
'Professor Robert Darnton, Director
of the Harvard University Library,
'is an expert on the history
of books.'
I have been invited to
so many conferences
on "the death of the book",
that I'm convinced
it's very much alive.
And we have statistics to prove it.
Each year, more books are produced
than the previous year.
There was a dip during
the recession, but next year,
there will be one million
new titles produced worldwide.
And yet at the same time,
more digital works are coming out
and the future is decidedly digital.
But I think we're living
in a time of transition,
in which the two media co-exist.
And I think that's what
makes it so exciting.
And they'll continue to co-exist?
One thing we've learnt
in the history of books,
which is a huge, expanding field,
is that one medium
does not displace another.
So, as you know, the radio
did not displace the newspaper.
Television did not kill the radio.
And the internet did not destroy
television, and so on.
So I think, actually,
what's happening now
is that the electronic
means of communication,
all kinds of hand-held devices
on which people read books,
are actually increasing the sales
of ordinary printed books.
The same number of people
are reading more, one or the other?
I think both. I think both.
But that, I can't absolutely prove.
However, it's certain, I think,
that a lot of people
use hand-held electronic devices
for one kind of reading
and use a codex
for another kind of reading,
and that the interest
and availability of books online
is getting people more excited
about reading in general.
So I think it's a fascinating moment,
when reading itself
is undergoing a change.
'I like to have
a foot in both camps -
'the shiny new digital world
of technology,
'and the traditional
path to knowledge,
'which is embodied by the library.
'I do hope that libraries survive.
They're more than just buildings
'in the same way that books are
more than just print and paper.'
As the poet, philosopher and
political theorist John Milton said,
books are not
absolutely dead things,
they do contain a potency of life.
"He who destroys a book,
kills reason itself."
Perhaps that's why, as we all know,
one of the first acts of a tyrant
is to destroy a library
and to burn books.
They want to control literature,
and the elitists want to hoard
the power and the knowledge
that is contained in books.
'But digital words cannot be burned,
'and myriad connections of the web
make online information mercurial.
'The internet is not only
radically transforming
'our way of storing
what we write,
'it is bringing about a new raft
of changes in what is written,
'and who writes it.
A man who has pioneered
'our exploration
of this new technological frontier
'is the founder of Wikipedia,
Jimmy Wales.'
When we look back at the history
of the encyclopaedia,
Diderot, the French enclopaedist,
the basic philosophy of Wikipedia
is essentially the same.
They had the idea of collecting
the world's knowledge
and making it
more accessible to more people.
And they did an amazing job.
But one of the problems
the traditional encyclopaedia form
always had is that once it's done
and you publish it, it's done.
And it's really hard to revise,
really hard to update.
Whereas the next edition of Wikipedia
happened since I started this sentence!
One of the reasons Wikipedia
can update so quickly
is that it's written by the public,
rather than a select group
of editors.
That whole process
just couldn't exist in the past.
You know, it was a one-way medium.
A few people wrote
and everybody else read.
Now everybody's participating
in the writing.
And I think you just can't
dismiss that as, you know...
It's one thing to read a book
and feel like you understand
political philosophy,
it's another to go out and have
a discussion or debate about it
and realise how little
you actually knew,
how much deeper and richer
your understanding is
with other people
discussing things with you.
Wikipedia is a part of the
long-term enlightenment trend.
It's part of this idea that everyone
should have access to knowledge,
that democratisation of information
is good for the world.
One type of search people do
is they just want to know something.
You know, you hear on the news,
"In Azerbaijan..." and you think,
"Oh, Azerbaijan, I sort of know
where that is... I don't really remember"
And you just go
and you look it up.
And you go and say, "OK, now
I understand what the situation is there"
and those kinds of things.
That's a very human impulse,
the desire to know things.
This democracy of the web
can have dramatic results.
Knowledge is power. And combined
with the widespread use of texting,
tweeting, and social media sites,
information can no longer be
so easily controlled
by a ruling elite.
It is in the hands of the masses -
"demos".
The flames of the Arab revolutions
were fuelled, fanned and organised
by writers on the web. The power
of the blog is that it can be
about everything, and by everyone.
Yes, politics, food, music,
and, of course, sex.
I'm picking up Dr Brooke Magnanti,
who blogged about her experiences
as a lady of the night, under
the nom de plume "Belle de Jour".
Hello, Stephen. Hello. Hop in.
'Brooke's blogs proved so popular
'they were published in book form,
as "Belle de Jour".'
What gave you the idea of blogging
what, for most people,
would be a very secret part of their
life, joining the sex industry?
Well, it seemed quite natural,
when I started doing something
that I couldn't really
openly speak with my friends about.
And I thought, there's some
absolutely brilliant, funny things
that are happening, I'd love to
be able to share it with someone.
So it seemed natural to me
to start blogging about it.
You were being both literary -
I think that's what astonished
people - and frank,
about something
that was mostly covered up.
Do you think if the internet
had not been invented,
you would have written a diary
anyway, in the old-fashioned way?
Probably. The neat thing about blogs
and one of the things I love,
- is that they're in reverse order.
- Yes.
So, in the past,
if you pick up somebody's diary,
you start on day one of when they
start writing and they explain things
and introduce characters
and this and that. With the blog,
you're reading what just happened.
There's this immediacy of,
"Who's that person? Why did they
say that? I've got to find out."
And it's almost addictive
in that way.
'Belle de Jour became so popular
that it was adapted for television.
'It acquired a life of its own
'and became something more communal
and interactive.'
It's changing all the time. For
instance, when I started my blog,
- commenting was unheard of. - Yes.
- Commenting didn't exist.
I've never had comments on my blog.
I didn't have two-way engagement
in the way that social networking
really has now.
This sort of direct connection
between the writer and the reader,
absolutely bypassing
all of the gatekeepers,
bypassing editors, bypassing critics,
bypassing the shops.
I was just blindly broadcasting,
- almost like a little radio station...
- Yes. - ... in my bedroom as it were.
Whereas now, I think it's changing,
things are a bit more collaborative,
and you can see it evolving.
It's just impossible to predict
where it's going to go.
Whatever happens next
is going to be a surprise.
Nobody will have called it
accurately.
Fantastic! Thank you so much.
And here we are, ready for your
next client. I mean, ready for...
- I'll drop you off here.
- Always a pleasure, sir!
'So, we are at an event horizon,
where publishers could disappear
'and a whole new way of experiencing
writing is in the offing.
'I asked the author Hanif Kureishi.'
Is it the same thing to read
a digital book as a physical book?
Well, I think there'll be
new kinds of books made.
Um, because people will read them
on iPads and so on,
which means that they can use
bits of film, they can use colour,
they can use drawings,
they can introduce footnotes
that go on for pages and pages.
So I think new technology
is a fantastic opportunity
for new forms, you know,
just as the invention of film,
then we had the cinema.
And digital, then we had new forms
of pop music and so on.
I think that the iPad particularly
will generate writers
to make new forms of books
and new forms of writing
that we haven't even thought of yet.
'For the last 20 years,
author Robert Coover
'has been experimenting
with interactive text.
'Is this the way of the future?
Or just one of the ways?'
Ah!
Oh, this is fantastic!
Oh, my goodness! Indifference,
punishment, interruptions.
And I'm in a cube.
'This is a 3D,
virtual reality cave -
'an amazing interface
between writer and reader.'
Oh, my goodness! This is magical!
It's all got huger, and it's all...
'Coover's work is fascinating, but
can never really have a mass market.
'It's just too expensive.'
'But at the world-renowned
MIT in Boston,
'some of the brightest and most
technologically savvy people in the world
'are trying to find out
other ways we might record
'and transmit information
in the future, for all of us.
'The researchers
at the MIT media centre
'are also experimenting with
new ways of sharing stories.'
So, what we have here is called
the never-ending drawing machine.
It's an e-book,
but an e-book of a different sort.
It's made out of paper and not only
is the book itself tangible,
but also it's possible to incorporate
tangible objects into it.
So this book is networked
and as we turn the pages...
Oh, a new page comes up!
'The idea is that people,
even miles apart,
'could interact via the book,
'adding their own images and text
'to create a communal,
interactive story.'
So, part of the idea of the project
is to make interfaces
for creative collaboration,
that go across boundaries.
So one is generational,
another one is cultural,
another one is...
Yeah, like acquired learning skills,
you know?
I could play these
with my grandfather,
though he was never trained
in computer science
or would not know how to
turn on a computer.
- But that wouldn't be a problem.
- But he can turn a page.
He can turn a page and press
a button, that's easy, exactly.
And he can just have the freedom
of using stuff that he finds familiar
in his environment.
'For the researchers here,
the key word is interactivity.
'The person reading the book
is also adding content.
'They're also experimenting with new ways
of recording and relaying information.
'For them, the senses of sight and
hearing are just part of the story.
'A truly immersive method
of communication
'would also involve
the sense of touch.'
We want to build technologies
that are not just in our world,
- but they are also intimate
with our own bodies. - Yes.
And they're connecting with us at
every millimetre, every millisecond.
'Their idea is to record
someone's movements,
'then allow a second person to feel
them, via the medium of a jacket,
'as a kind of second skin.'
And as you say,
the implications for gaming
and a narrative world
in which you can participate.
Absolutely. Imagine if you can
download your data
for your grandson,
who, 20, 30, 40 years from now
can actually live
through a day of your life.
- Oh, my God. - So you can connect
people through space and time,
and cultures and ages.
Stories are what make us human,
and we need to create
new containers to tell the stories.
It's what really drives me.
Exactly. And I suppose it's
about it all being human-shaped,
not technology-shaped.
- The technology shapes itself
to the human. - Yes.
Not the human to the technology.
And talking of shaping,
Ken is very slim and properly built
and I'm a great...
- But is it possible to try this on?
- We can try it on.
Shall I have a go?
I'd love just to get a feel.
- Let's get this here. Yeah. It's
sort of on, isn't it? - Yeah, exactly.
So, in your hands,
if you move your hands...
Oh, yes!..You will feel
as if I'm pushing you. Yes.
And it's not like I'm holding you
and moving you, it's more subtle.
Yeah. Almost like a magnet
in a magnetic field,
- that slight feeling of...
- Exactly.
'All these technologies are ways
of recording and transmitting
'feelings, ideas and stories.
'You could say that they're
writing, but not as we know it.
'They're the next generation of
communication
'for a world that is transcending
the written word.'
Even if reading and writing
were to disappear tomorrow,
I would argue that
the changes they have made to us,
technological, cultural,
intellectual,
and in terms of
the adaptation of memory
and the transmission of history,
they would remain.
We may have invented
reading and writing,
but reading and writing
have re-invented us.
But one thing that has never changed
is our eternal love of storytelling.
And that predates even
reading and writing.
And that's what I'm going to be
looking at next time.
'I'm going to introduce you
to some of my favourite writers.'
He has invented our language.
He's so ultra-modern!
To be or not to be?
That is the question.
"True wit is nature
to advantage dressed.
"What oft was thought,
but ne'er so well expressed."
A man hears what he wants to hear
and disregards the rest.
You go through life and realise
people are only hearing
a bit of what you say, because
it's the bit that suits them.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
amazing things that we humans do.
'It separates us from the animals,
'gives us theatre, poetry and songs.
'It shapes our identity
and allows us to express emotions.'
'It makes us laugh.
It makes us cry.'
'It allows us to record our
histories and imagine our futures.'
Oh, my goodness! This is magical.
In this programme,
I'm going to explore
language's physical incarnation,
our greatest invention - writing.
Since its birth 5,000 years ago,
the written word has given us
civilisation and technology.
I'm going to reveal how it's
transformed the way we interpret
and explore our world,
how we organise our religions
and governments
and how we spread our ideas
and our laws.
How writing allows us
to listen to the past
and to speak to the future.
But is writing here to stay,
or is it just a flash in the pen?
'Learning to talk,
like learning to walk,
'is a natural part of growing up.
'It's something that children
the world over do instinctively.'
'But while spoken language
'is an innate part of
the human operating system,
'something we've been doing
for maybe only 50,000 years,
'the ability to read and write
is an optional extra.'
Reading and writing are not
a natural state of affairs.
It's just something
that's been invented
to complement utterance -
spoken human language.
In fact, it's not necessary or
essential for communication at all,
and there are hundreds
of societies around the world
which have existed for centuries,
perfectly happily,
without feeling the need
to write down their language.
The Akha, here in North Thailand,
is one such.
'While anthropologists might
attribute the lack of writing
'to the culture's
self-sufficient economy,
'the Akha have their own story.
'According to myth,
'they were given writing
by the first spirit,
'Un Ma, on a buffalo hide.
'But the Akha don't have
a written language now,
'so what on earth happened?'
It was written down on buffalo skin?
♪
♪
♪
♪
♪
Oh, right! Cos of the meat.
They ate it up!
So, the guardians of
the Akha alphabet ate up...
I see.
Since those days, we don't have...
- Since then, you rely on your memory.
- Yes.
'Traditionally,
the Akha keep in their heads
'and pass on verbally,
all their culture -
'their myths, stories
and their entire history,
'all the way back to
their founding father, their Adam.'
And so, that's all in your head?
How many generations?
Do you learn songs, as well?
'Aju, like the rest
of the literate world,
'now uses writing rather than
his brain to remember things.
'Rather than fight progress, he wants the
next generation to learn to read and write,
'so they can preserve
their culture on the page.
'Reading and writing will give them
access not just to their past,
'but to that of the rest
of the world.'
'Writing lets us discover things
'about cultures
far away in space and time.
'And some of the oldest writing
is here, at the British Museum.
'So, how and why did it start?'
The British Museum has thousands
of objects with writing on them,
some of them more than
five millennia old.
It's a matter of intense debate
amongst the curators
of the various departments here
as to who has the oldest.
The Egyptologists claim
that they have the edge,
while the Assyriologists,
they maintain that their form -
cuneiform writing - is the oldest.
Either way, it seems that writing
was not invented
for the purposes of writing
love poems or novels or prayers,
but actually
for the rather more mundane purpose
of taxation and accountancy.
'As societies grew and flourished
in the cradle of civilisation,
'today's Iraq, so did the need for
bureaucracy and record-keeping.
'Who owes what to whom?
'This early clay tablet records
the payment of workers in beer.'
'Behind the scenes at the museum,
'Dr Irving Finkel, Keeper of
the Department of Assyriology,
'is giving some students a lesson
'in writing cuneiform
the traditional way -
'on a piece of clay, with a reed.
'I'm attempting to write my name.'
So, an upright like that and then...
..that and that. Sort of more...
Not quite. It's a bit too big.
- Well, it's assertive.
- Yeah, it is.
And then, one upright.
'The first teachers of writing
used to beat their students.
'I hope Dr Finkel doesn't subscribe
to such violent methods.'
Stephen, as you know,
cuneiform writing
is the oldest form of writing
in the history of the world.
- I knew that. - Don't let anybody
dissuade you of any other truth.
It began in ancient Iraq
and various remarkable things
have to be stressed.
Firstly, that the people
who invented writing
had no idea what was
going to be the consequence.
They did it for local,
bureaucratic reasons -
they had to keep books and accounts
on incoming and outgoing goods.
That's how it all began.
Nobody had a vision of
giving writing to the world.
That it was going to end up
with Shakespeare and Proust
- and Barbara Cartland.
- Precisely.
But once it started in the world,
it never stopped.
And like a snowball,
it grew and grew and grew,
until it's become the kind of
intellectual prop of homo sapiens.
So, it's a very significant thing.
In our department to do with
Ancient Mesopotamia,
we have the earliest evidence.
So, what I brought firstly
to show you is a real tablet.
This was written by
a schoolboy in about 1700 BC.
- Good Lord! - The most wonderful thing
is there is one example of this.
A tablet like this - on the back,
there is a caricature of the teacher
and this teacher has
a goofy kind of tooth
and a stupid expression on his face
and this is clearly a pupil
who is fed up to his back teeth.
- So, this is his rough book,
his exercise book? - Yeah.
In my view, there's something
really important to be learned,
which is, the human beings
who made these things
are absolutely close to us.
There are voices singing out
of these apparently dead objects.
Exactly.
The dazzling wonder
of the human mind,
as we know it today, forcefully,
in my view, is there to be
plucked out of these documents.
'Of course, cuneiform wasn't just
used to write bills and accounts.
'In no time at all,
people started writing poems,
'love letters and legends.
'Written stories,
like the Epic Of Gilgamesh
'give us a glimpse
into a different world.
'A world where writing itself
was a source of power.
'Writing allowed rulers
to lay down the first laws,
'send secret messages in battles
'and write their own versions
of events.
'Only a few highly trained scribes
'could read and write
this complex script,
'but in doing so, they took humans
from prehistoric times
'into the pages of history.'
Writing was developed separately
and independently all over the world
and by 1200 BC,
it was flourishing in India,
China, Europe and Egypt.
Now, while some ancient scripts
have yet to be deciphered
even to this day,
the language of the pharaohs,
hieroglyphs,
has been successfully translated
and transcribed
thanks to the Rosetta Stone.
'The same inscription on this stone
is written three times,
'in Ancient Greek,
Egyptian Demotic script
'and the original
Egyptian hieroglyphs.
'These three scripts
allowed hieroglyphs
'finally to be deciphered.'
The phrase "Rosetta Stone"
has become a kind of metaphor
for anything that is a key part
in the process of decoding,
translating
or solving a difficult problem.
But all written language
is a form of code
and without the ability to read,
it just becomes as incomprehensible
as the marks on this rock are,
to me, at least.
You probably learnt to
read and write as I did,
by using letter tiles,
or you had those sort of
strips of paper
round your primary school classroom
with A for apple and B for bear and
C for carthorse, or whatever it was.
The amazing thing about
the system of an alphabet
is you don't have learn symbols,
you just learn these individual
letters that make the sounds.
Once you do, anything is possible.
You can just make up all kinds of
fantastic phrases.
I adore playing with... Oh, look.
Look what we can have here.
Playing with letters and words.
The alphabet allowed
what you might call
a democratisation
of reading and writing.
And the alphabet that we use
came to use via the Romans,
from that great,
democratic civilisation,
Ancient Greece.
'The Greeks were famous
for epic stories.
'Homer's Iliad
and Odyssey told tales
'of wars and adventures
all around the Mediterranean.
'But Homer himself didn't write.'
Some romantically-minded scholars
have proposed that a brilliant
contemporary of Homer
invented the alphabet in order
to record the poet's oral epics,
The Iliad and The Odyssey.
It seems unlikely, but Homer himself
does give us a clue
as to the origins of writing.
In The Iliad and The Odyssey,
he mentions the Phoenicians,
traders who travelled
the Mediterranean in ships.
'The Phoenicians were
the great merchants of antiquity
'with ports in modern day Syria,
Lebanon and Israel,
'and all over the Mediterranean.
'But they didn't just
transport goods.
'They introduced
a whole new way of writing -
'the alphabet.
'Theirs was the mother
of all alphabets,
'including our own.'
You're an extraordinarily
accomplished fellow.
You don't just dig around in sites,
you actually can write Phoenician.
- Maybe you can show me the alphabet?
- Aboslutely.
Give me a sense of how it looks.
- Ah, you've got a...
- Yeah.
So, just for example,
the letter Aleph in Proto-Canaanite
or Canaanite script,
it was in the shape
of a head of an ox.
Sorry for my drawing. Fair enough.
But later,
it was transformed in Phoenician,
early Phoenician, into something like
this, which is the shape...
And, of course, if you transform it
in the right direction... Yeah.
..you get the Alpha or the A
or other languages.
In later Phoenician inscription,
was this symbol,
sometimes it even had a small iris.
So, basically, it was transformed
into the Omicron,
the little O.
'For the Phoenicians, the more
people who could read and write,
'the better.
'The alphabet allowed them
to communicate
'and deal more effectively
with foreign trading partners.
'Spreading the word
made sound economic sense.'
The important point about
the Phoenician culture
is that, being a trading culture,
it wasn't interested in leaving
permanent religious memorials in writing,
it was more about
taking writing around
as a way of facilitating the trade
that was the basis of their...
Therefore, they got such a bad press
because in the Bible,
they are the bringer of foreign,
idolatrous, er, cults.
The foreign idols - Jezebel
the queen, the Phoenician queen.
So, these people have
never written history,
but they got all the bad press
from everybody.
They wrote the records,
but they don't survive.
It's very likely.
It's very likely that much
was on papyrus and was lost.
'Papyrus, like the alphabet,
was another Phoenician export.
'We get our word "paper" from it.
'The Greeks gave a collection
of papyrus a new name - byblos,
'from which we get our word "Bible".
' "God, in mysterious Sinai's
awful cave
' "To man the wondrous art
of writing gave",
'wrote Blake in his book Jerusalem.
'Writing allowed the priests
and the rabbis
'to set in stone their beliefs.
'Once written,
customs became religious laws
'and the word of God
could not be edited.
'Writing has allowed one religion,
Judaism,
'to last virtually unchanged
for millennia.'
Behind me is
the Western or Wailing Wall,
one of the most sacred places
in all Judaism.
The written word is integral
to worship here.
Observant Jewish men
have strips of paper
with words from Deuteronomy
and Exodus on them
and these are carried in little
boxes here called phylacteries,
which they have strapped to
their head and to their left arm
as they pray.
Other worshippers write down prayers
to God on scraps of paper
and push them into the cracks
and crevices of the wall behind,
and it's forbidden to remove them.
Twice a year, the rabbi of the Wall
takes them and buries them
in the Mount of Olives.
It's as if the writing
itself is sacrosanct
and imbued with a special power,
and when talking about
the power of words in religion
you absolutely cannot ignore Islam.
Just behind the Western Wall,
yards from it,
is the Dome of the Rock, the third
holiest site in Sunni Islam.
It's covered in writings,
in inscriptions from
the Islamic holy book, the Koran,
and for Islam the Arabic script
is more than just
a writing system invented by man -
it's a gift from God.
In fact, one of the sayings
of the prophet is that
the ink of a scholar is holier
than the blood of a martyr.
Now, it may be that the Arabic
script plays second fiddle to Hebrew
here in Israel, but on the world
stage it's a very different story
and in fact Arabic script is second only
to our own Roman alphabet for use.
The spread of religion
and the spread of writing
have gone hand-in-hand,
and, with writing
so fundamental to faith,
it's not surprising that
people go to such lengths
to protect and preserve
the written words of their gods.
Here in Jerusalem there's
the aptly named Shrine Of The Book,
where some of the most precious
religious writings are on display,
but even in these special and carefully
climate-controlled conditions,
some of the older texts are in
danger of being lost to us forever.
The most famous documents displayed
here are the dead Sea Scrolls,
fragments of biblical texts and religious
writings from the time of Christ.
The scrolls lay hidden
for nearly two millennia,
until a Bedouin shepherd
stumbled upon them in 1946.
They are believed
to be the discovery
of the 20th century.
We are talking about a corpus
of over 900 manuscripts,
comprising all of the books
of the Bible.
These are the oldest copies of the
Bible that we have, 2,000 years old.
These ancient texts are so fragile
that only four
highly trained researchers from
the Israel antiquities authority
are allowed
actually to handle them.
What Lynn is going to show you now
is a sample of the book of Psalms.
Oh, goodness! That's
the real thing, isn't it? Yes.
You're looking at it upside down,
but this is...
It might as well be
upside down to me,
but if you want to turn it
round the right way!
We have about six such plates,
six such pieces,
and we keep them as they were found.
If you look closely here,
even if you can't read Hebrew,
every place the name of God
is written exactly, the yodh, Yahweh,
it is written in what
we call Paleo-Hebrew,
which is the Hebrew of
first Temple times.
So, an ancient Hebrew,
and older Hebrew.
And that's God, God, God,
every time,
- and there's quite a lot of him,
obviously. - Yes.
- He features quite highly.
- Right. Please don't touch.
- Sorry, I was touching the glass,
wasn't I? - Yes.
'These documents are so precious that
even touching the glass is forbidden,
'and the next scroll is all about
rules and regulations.
'It's the Ten Commandments.'
This is the only copy that contains
all of the Ten Commandments.
Oh, my goodness!
Is this the oldest record
of the Ten Commandments?
- This is the oldest record of
the Ten Commandments. - Wow, amazing.
So, that alone would be
the most priceless...
- document, isn't it?
- Right, right. - Amazing.
Every child or every grown-up,
when you say the Ten Commandments,
knows what you're talking about.
And breaks one of them every day!
And breaks one of them every day,
and these are 2,000 years old.
That is extraordinary,
extraordinary.
'These ancient words
are now being protected
'with space age technology -
spectral imaging.
'By photographing the scrolls under
different wavelengths of light,
'new sections of the text
are made visible.'
Oh, yes. It's even becoming clear
in the dark...
Goodness me.
'Once digitised, all 900 fragments
of the scrolls will be
'made available online to scholars
and members of the public.'
Fantastic.
Isn't it wonderful to think
something so old,
so - I won't say primitive -
but the dawn of writing
and everything,
is dependent on our age of the most
extraordinary technological advances
in order to preserve it?
It's rather splendid,
the old meeting new like that.
♪
Yes, writing utterly changed
the human world.
With writing we could preserve
our myths, our stories and our laws.
The alphabet, whether Phoenician,
Hebrew, Arabic, Greek or Roman,
allowed more and more people
to read and write,
but there was yet to come another
major revolution in writing
that would spread the word
further than ever -
printing.
'Now, you might think that printing
started in Europe in 1450
'with Johannes Gutenberg,
'but this revolutionary technology -
like gunpowder, the compass
'and papermaking - was invented
in China nearly 400 years earlier.'
Hi, hello. I'm Stephen, Stephen Fry.
Nice to see you.
Can you make me one of these chops,
with my name?
'Once carved, block printing
is much quicker
'than handwriting
each complex character,
'but there's a reason why printing
didn't take off in China,
'and that is the sheer volume
of characters -
'literally thousands of them.'
Chinese is one of the oldest
written languages in the world,
and we all know these extraordinary
characters or ideograms,
they're familiar
almost as works of art.
To the Chinese, they are the start
of a lifelong learning process,
because you have to learn each one,
each one has a particular meaning.
And the key difference
between Chinese
and almost all the other languages
of the world, certainly ours,
is that there's no hint
as to how you say them.
What's that like? Well, behind me
you can see the number 60.
That doesn't tell you to say "sixty"
if you're English you say "sixty",
if you're French you say "soixante",
if you're German you'd
say "sechzig", and so on.
It's a symbol.
Imagine that all the numbers from
0 to 2,000 had a separate symbol.
You'd have to learn them all, and
there's no hint how to say them.
'Unlike most other writing systems,
'which phonetically
use symbols or letters
'to represent the sounds
that make up words,
'Chinese characters, or logograms,
represent whole words.
'I'm given a cursory lesson in
how to write this complex script
'by entrepreneur philanthropist
extraordinaire Sir David Tang
'and his calligrapher friend,
Johnson.'
Pictograms are basically
little pictures,
and Chinese words
are composed of radicals,
which are the roots
that you use all the time,
the small pictures you use
all the time to compose words.
For example, this word, "moon",
it is a stylised picture of the moon
and this word for "brightness"
is a composite
of two radicals -
the sun and moon.
So it goes on like that.
So, now, the ones I think I know,
I've seen, anyway, is this China?
Oh, look,
I've got one of these brush pens.
I know, I'm doing it wrong,
but basically that.
That will show you up as
a very ill-educated boy,
because the order in which
you do the stroke is critical.
Whenever people see...
My uncle, if he sees me
writing a word in the wrong order,
he would immediately chastise me
and say, "You uneducated boy, don't
you know how to write that character?"
So, the proper way is one stroke,
two stroke, three and four.
There is no other way
of writing this character.
And the strokes are very important,
because that is the way
in which you look up a word.
This word is "wood",
it looks like a tree.
And you add two more...
That's "full of trees".
And you yet add two more,
which makes five...
That's a forest.
Brilliant.
'Traditionally, Chinese children
have had to learn
'the meaning of thousands
of different characters.
'The complexity of Chinese script
meant that
'when the Communist revolution
took place in 1949,
'less than 20% of the population
could read.'
So, Mao Tse-tung, the great leader,
the scary leader of China
for so many years,
decided that he would institute
a new way of rendering Chinese
into a sort of phonetic alphabet,
a romanisation, as it's called.
'The challenge was to represent
the many tones of spoken Mandarin
'with just 26 letters
of the Roman alphabet.
'The system that was adopted
was called pinyin.
'Pinyin allows children to learn
the sounds of words
'and their meanings
via the phonetic Roman alphabet.
'It acts as a stepping stone
'towards learning
the thousands of characters.'
'The man who invented pinyin,
Zhou Youguang, is now 106
'and is hailed as
a national treasure,
'but is incredibly modest
about his achievements.
Is pinyin one of the great
achievements of the revolution,
do you think?
One of the gratest?
♪
No?
♪
♪
♪
'At the onset of Mao's revolution,
'literacy rates
were running at 20%.
'Within two decades
that had increased fourfold.'
♪
Was it ever your aim,
or is it now your aim,
for pinyin to take over
from the Chinese character?
♪
'Pinyin has transformed how people
in China use technology.
'A traditional Chinese typewriter
had over 2,000 characters.
'It was slow and unwieldy to use.
'But by using pinyin on computers
and smartphones, people can find
'the right Chinese character without
having them all on a keyboard.'
So, on this phone
I can choose pinyin. Now, if I type,
let's say a word we know, "Beijing".
That one there or that one there
or that one there...
That's the point, that allows you
to use the Roman alphabet
to find the characters,
otherwise it would be impossible.
'So, it is the simplicity
of the alphabet,
'and the ability easily to
rearrange letters,
'that gives it its potency
as a tool for spreading the word.'
Johannes Gutenberg's
great innovation
was to combine the Chinese
invention - block printing -
with typography - the art and technique
of arranging type moveably.
Movable type freed the written
word from the drudgery
of hand-scribing and allowed it
to take flight in printed texts.
There's something magical about
a bound volume of printed text.
I can never forget the moment
I first saw a novel I'd written
that had arrived from the printers.
I put it on the table
and I looked at it
and I lowered my eyes to its level,
I sniffed it, I opened it,
I walked and circled it,
and I simply couldn't believe
that something I had written
could end up
as that magical thing -
bound, printed text, a book.
Printing would, after Gutenberg,
unleash knowledge
and new ways of thinking
that would change everything.
'The city of Norwich
has a long history of printing.
'It was the first town in Britain
to have a provincial newspaper.'
This ivy-clad, willow-lined stretch
of the river Wensum
in the shadow of Norwich Cathedral
was once,
hard to believe as it may be,
the centre of a kind of
Silicon Valley of Europe.
Because here was a thriving
and prosperous printworks,
and that was the industry
that changed the world.
'Now all remains is
the John Jarrold Printing Museum,
'run by retired experts from the
industry. They're going to help me
'type-set a poem written by Chaucer,
'the first English author
to be set in print.'
I believe that England's first
great poet, Geoffrey Chaucer,
would rather have liked
a printing press.
He died just around the time
that Gutenberg was being born,
so he missed the print revolution.
But he certainly gave us indication
that he was rather fed up
with the sloppiness of those who
copied out his works for readers.
In fact, in one of his great poems,
Troilus and Cressida, in the envoi,
the bit where he sends his book
out to the public,
he sort of makes a request
that it isn't too badly mangled.
He says, "For there is
so great diversity in English
"and in writing of our tongue,
"so pray I God that none
miswrite thee, little book."
"Nee the mysmetre
for defaute of tonge
"and read whereso thou be
or else sung,
"that thou be understonde,
"God I beseech. But yet to purpose
of my rather speech."
In other words, he hoped
that people would find some way
of spelling all the different words
at least in such a manner
that it was understood by those
who were going to listen or read it.
And that's what printing allowed.
'I'm going to print Chaucer's envoi
'with the help of typesetter
David Skipper.'
What's the plan?
Well, this is the composing case
with the characters,
capitals and lower case.
Is that why we say upper case
and lower case?
Why you say upper case and lower case
is that the capitals
used to be in the upper case
on the frame,
and the small letters used to be
in the lower case. Of course.
How long did it take to train,
how old were you when you started?
I was 16 when I started.
- So it was a proper apprenticeship?
- And I did five years, yes. - Coo.
So, you pick the character up,
you feel for the space on top
and you put it in the stick.
Oh, I see.
"And for there..." We need
another E, don't we?
Well, I was doing a piece of text
that I saw...
Oh, it's a Chaucerian spelling,
is it?
Of course, so we don't need
another E.
Let's have a look,
what have we got here,
"And for ther is
so gret diversite."
"Is so gret," and "gret"
doesn't have an A in it. No.
Oh, you've memorised it!
'English in the Middle Ages
was incredibly diverse.
'Dialects of different regions had
different words for the same thing,
'and different spellings.
'When Caxton brought the printing
press to Britain in 1476,
'he was faced with a dilemma.
'He couldn't print all the different
arbitrary spellings
'that were spread around
the country.
'By setting words in print,
'Caxton started to make
the English language more stable.'
'And printed books spread these
changes across the country.'
He's hoping that when this poem
goes out in the world
no-one will miscopy it
or miswrite it.
Miswrite, I see, in that sense.
It reminds one
of the World Wide Web, really,
that in 1993 Tim Berners-Lee creates
this new system, the World Wide Web,
for linking text
across different computers,
and within what seems a heartbeat
there are billions of pages
of World Wide Web.
- When things take off, they really do
take off, don't they? - Yes.
And when you ink the type, you do
it diagonally. I noticed that.
Yeah, because it doesn't
push it over so much.
And quite firm,
but not too firm.
And then the other way,
then you get all the corners.
That's enough.
Then you just check that
that's all pushed up like that.
And I'll get a piece of...
Two pieces of card.
I notice you use the yellow paper
to go on top.
That's right, a couple of sheets
just to give a bit of impression.
I see, OK.
Pop your first one on, that's it.
Nice and straight-ish.
- Then that goes on like that?
- That's right. - Just one roll?
One roll, straight across. Ooh!
- Still magical.
- Then carefully lift it off.
And, voila!
That's brilliant!
I think Chaucer
would be thrilled at that.
And it looks like proper printing,
doesn't it? It looks really...
- It is proper printing!
- That's what I mean!
And you can tell!
'With printing, the written word
truly began to spread.
'Printed books, like the Phoenician
alphabet millennia before,
'democratised knowledge.
'Reading was no longer
just an activity for the elite,
'but something that ordinary people
could afford to learn to do.'
Printing didn't just give rise
to greater literacy,
it changed people's very attitude
towards learning and knowledge.
Open enquiry and questioning of
received wisdom greatly increased,
and the booksellers of Paris
have long been part of
a kind of literary underworld,
spreading subversive ideas
by printed pamphlets, books,
leaflets and newspapers.
The printed word fostered a republic
of letters, the age of reason -
the Enlightenment.
'In London, Oxford, Vienna,
Edinburgh, Warsaw and Paris,
'like-minded thinkers congregated
to read as well as to learn from
'and debate with each other
in taverns or coffee houses.
'One of the oldest and most famous
is the Cafe Procope.
'This was the haunt of intellectual
giants like Rousseau, Voltaire,
'Franklin, Jefferson and Diderot.
So it seems like a good place
'to meet Enlightenment scholar
Dr Kate Tunstall and find out about
'the book that embodies
the Enlightenment project -
'Diderot's Encyclopaedia.'
It's an encyclopaedia,
it's an Enlightenment project,
so it's covering human knowledge
in a rational, ordered way,
and presumably the world of man
in letters and music and poetry,
- but also the world of nature
and science? - Yes.
Could Diderot... Was he a master
of those subjects as well?
He was a kind of spider
at the centre of a web,
where he was receiving articles
from all kinds of people.
There were about 140, 150
contributors,
and Diderot receives,
we think, all of these articles
and produces a whole lot of them
himself and needs to coordinate this.
It obviously relied on a man
with an extraordinary mind,
as you say, like a spider in a web,
to control all these lines of thought
and all these cross-disciplines.
Yeah, you can get those things
wrong.
Whereas on the web you can alter
those things as you go,
because it hasn't been printed,
as soon as it's been printed,
if you've forgotten to put the
cross reference in, you're in trouble.
'Diderot's aim for his encyclopaedia
was to assemble
'each and every branch of human
knowledge, creating a volume
'that had the power to change men's
common way of thinking.
'His project was,
in a strictly secular way,
'as ambitious as
the Bible had been.'
So, a really extraordinary
achievement,
and not just a sober
setting in stone of world knowledge,
- but a kind of mischievous...
- Very mischievous.
..undermining of the previous
church, the ecclesiastical world.
- Shall we look something up?
- Oh, do, give me some examples.
I want to tell you my favourite
article, which is,
"Aguaxima, Natural History,"
in brackets afterwards,
"Brazilian plant."
"That's all this article
says about it," I'm quoting.
"And I wonder
who such a description is made for.
"It cannot be for people
who live in the country,
"because they know what aguaxima is
and that it grows in their region.
"It would be as if you'd said to a
Frenchman that pears grow in France.
"It's not for us, either, because
"what do we care that there's
a plant in Brazil called aguaxima?
"This article leaves ignorant people
just as ignorant as they were before.
"It teaches us nothing,
"and so, if I have decided
to mention this plant,
"it's just to indulge certain
kinds of readers who would rather
"find nothing of interest
in an article of a dictionary,
"or indeed something
perfectly stupid,
"than not find the word
in the dictionary at all."
- That's fantastic!
- That's the end of it.
You imagine him late at night
and he's had "agave" or something,
and "Aguaxima,
why should I bother?!
"But now that I've got the slip of paper
that says it's a plant in Brazil,
I can't throw it away,
"I promised to write
an encyclopaedia."
- But he feels it's a bit stupid just
to say "plant in Brazil". - Exactly!
That's a fabulous insight into
of the workings of his mind.
The project to describe all human
knowledge and all sciences,
all crafts in these volumes
is an extraordinary project, yeah.
'Printing led to an accumulation of
knowledge, and new ways of thinking.
'It triggered revolutions in
agriculture, industry and science.
'And we had more and more books.
But what to do with them?
'The answer
was to build more libraries.'
Almost everything I am
I owe to libraries.
When I was a child there were
no great libraries around,
certainly nothing like this,
but we did have this thing called
the mobile library, a van that would
come once a fortnight, I think,
and I would wait for it like a child
waiting for an ice cream van.
And I would get on
and get my supply of books
and they would last me two weeks.
Then when I was older I could get to
Norwich, the local big city,
and I would spend hours and hours
and hours there.
It's like a will o' the wisp,
one book lights another book
which lights another one,
which lights another one.
I suppose libraries still, for me,
have this extraordinary charge.
When I get in one I feel this buzz,
it's almost sexual,
there's something about the...
the fact that behind all these
bound copies, there are voices,
there are people murmuring to you,
seducing you,
dragging you into their world.
These are wonderful, magical places.
I suppose, if I have a campaign
that I'm really behind,
it's that of saving our libraries.
Because everyone surely has the right
to access the voices of the past.
'Although a Cambridge man,
I'm exploring
'one of the oldest and most
impressive libraries in the world -
'Oxford University's library,
the Bodleian.
'No-one, no matter how important,
can actually borrow books
'from this library, and to become
a reader, I have to pledge an oath.'
"I hereby undertake not to remove
from the library
"or to mark, deface
or injure in any way,
"any volume, document
or other object
"belonging to it
or in its custody..."
'The oath was intended to protect
the 11 million books
'and countless priceless manuscripts
that are housed here.'
So here is a fantastic transition
between manuscript and print.
You have hand work
for the illumination
and you have print to print
the main part of the text,
but it's on vellum.
And so to Ferdinand of Naples,
who may well have felt
slightly uneasy
about the new technology of print -
this would have been
much more familiar to him.
'But these days, the library
has another challenge -
'how to stay relevant
in a digital age.
'While the internet has many mundane
uses, from booking holidays
'to doing our weekly grocery shop,
it also has a colossal impact
'on the way we consume words
and knowledge.
'We can access,
almost instantaneously,
'an enormous repository
of information
'at the mere click of a button
or swipe of a finger.'
What marks a great library out
is how the collections are used,
how access is provided,
and the kinds of environments,
both physical and virtual,
that you're able to provide scholars
and, you know, the whole interested
public, with access to information.
This great archive
that we're responsible for.
And the whole library world
is collectively responsible for.
It really needs to be used to be,
you know, meaningful. Yeah.
Will you move,
in the next hundred years,
away from receiving atomic matter?
And will you ask publishers,
instead of providing you
with physical books...?
The process has already begun
and is driven by the publishers.
So there are many publishers
who only publish electronically.
So we have to do
digital preservations.
So you have library shelves, but
do you also have racks of servers?
We certainly do.
We also have staff
whose job it is to keep stuff safe.
To keep the bits alive,
so that scholars in 400 years' time
will be able to access the
information that's been produced now
just as we're able to access information
printed by the great scholars.
Yes, it's a different expertise.
'We're producing and consuming more
and more words in a digital form.
'But do our technological advances
mean that the printed version
'of the book will become as moribund
as the clay cuneiform tablet?
'Professor Robert Darnton, Director
of the Harvard University Library,
'is an expert on the history
of books.'
I have been invited to
so many conferences
on "the death of the book",
that I'm convinced
it's very much alive.
And we have statistics to prove it.
Each year, more books are produced
than the previous year.
There was a dip during
the recession, but next year,
there will be one million
new titles produced worldwide.
And yet at the same time,
more digital works are coming out
and the future is decidedly digital.
But I think we're living
in a time of transition,
in which the two media co-exist.
And I think that's what
makes it so exciting.
And they'll continue to co-exist?
One thing we've learnt
in the history of books,
which is a huge, expanding field,
is that one medium
does not displace another.
So, as you know, the radio
did not displace the newspaper.
Television did not kill the radio.
And the internet did not destroy
television, and so on.
So I think, actually,
what's happening now
is that the electronic
means of communication,
all kinds of hand-held devices
on which people read books,
are actually increasing the sales
of ordinary printed books.
The same number of people
are reading more, one or the other?
I think both. I think both.
But that, I can't absolutely prove.
However, it's certain, I think,
that a lot of people
use hand-held electronic devices
for one kind of reading
and use a codex
for another kind of reading,
and that the interest
and availability of books online
is getting people more excited
about reading in general.
So I think it's a fascinating moment,
when reading itself
is undergoing a change.
'I like to have
a foot in both camps -
'the shiny new digital world
of technology,
'and the traditional
path to knowledge,
'which is embodied by the library.
'I do hope that libraries survive.
They're more than just buildings
'in the same way that books are
more than just print and paper.'
As the poet, philosopher and
political theorist John Milton said,
books are not
absolutely dead things,
they do contain a potency of life.
"He who destroys a book,
kills reason itself."
Perhaps that's why, as we all know,
one of the first acts of a tyrant
is to destroy a library
and to burn books.
They want to control literature,
and the elitists want to hoard
the power and the knowledge
that is contained in books.
'But digital words cannot be burned,
'and myriad connections of the web
make online information mercurial.
'The internet is not only
radically transforming
'our way of storing
what we write,
'it is bringing about a new raft
of changes in what is written,
'and who writes it.
A man who has pioneered
'our exploration
of this new technological frontier
'is the founder of Wikipedia,
Jimmy Wales.'
When we look back at the history
of the encyclopaedia,
Diderot, the French enclopaedist,
the basic philosophy of Wikipedia
is essentially the same.
They had the idea of collecting
the world's knowledge
and making it
more accessible to more people.
And they did an amazing job.
But one of the problems
the traditional encyclopaedia form
always had is that once it's done
and you publish it, it's done.
And it's really hard to revise,
really hard to update.
Whereas the next edition of Wikipedia
happened since I started this sentence!
One of the reasons Wikipedia
can update so quickly
is that it's written by the public,
rather than a select group
of editors.
That whole process
just couldn't exist in the past.
You know, it was a one-way medium.
A few people wrote
and everybody else read.
Now everybody's participating
in the writing.
And I think you just can't
dismiss that as, you know...
It's one thing to read a book
and feel like you understand
political philosophy,
it's another to go out and have
a discussion or debate about it
and realise how little
you actually knew,
how much deeper and richer
your understanding is
with other people
discussing things with you.
Wikipedia is a part of the
long-term enlightenment trend.
It's part of this idea that everyone
should have access to knowledge,
that democratisation of information
is good for the world.
One type of search people do
is they just want to know something.
You know, you hear on the news,
"In Azerbaijan..." and you think,
"Oh, Azerbaijan, I sort of know
where that is... I don't really remember"
And you just go
and you look it up.
And you go and say, "OK, now
I understand what the situation is there"
and those kinds of things.
That's a very human impulse,
the desire to know things.
This democracy of the web
can have dramatic results.
Knowledge is power. And combined
with the widespread use of texting,
tweeting, and social media sites,
information can no longer be
so easily controlled
by a ruling elite.
It is in the hands of the masses -
"demos".
The flames of the Arab revolutions
were fuelled, fanned and organised
by writers on the web. The power
of the blog is that it can be
about everything, and by everyone.
Yes, politics, food, music,
and, of course, sex.
I'm picking up Dr Brooke Magnanti,
who blogged about her experiences
as a lady of the night, under
the nom de plume "Belle de Jour".
Hello, Stephen. Hello. Hop in.
'Brooke's blogs proved so popular
'they were published in book form,
as "Belle de Jour".'
What gave you the idea of blogging
what, for most people,
would be a very secret part of their
life, joining the sex industry?
Well, it seemed quite natural,
when I started doing something
that I couldn't really
openly speak with my friends about.
And I thought, there's some
absolutely brilliant, funny things
that are happening, I'd love to
be able to share it with someone.
So it seemed natural to me
to start blogging about it.
You were being both literary -
I think that's what astonished
people - and frank,
about something
that was mostly covered up.
Do you think if the internet
had not been invented,
you would have written a diary
anyway, in the old-fashioned way?
Probably. The neat thing about blogs
and one of the things I love,
- is that they're in reverse order.
- Yes.
So, in the past,
if you pick up somebody's diary,
you start on day one of when they
start writing and they explain things
and introduce characters
and this and that. With the blog,
you're reading what just happened.
There's this immediacy of,
"Who's that person? Why did they
say that? I've got to find out."
And it's almost addictive
in that way.
'Belle de Jour became so popular
that it was adapted for television.
'It acquired a life of its own
'and became something more communal
and interactive.'
It's changing all the time. For
instance, when I started my blog,
- commenting was unheard of. - Yes.
- Commenting didn't exist.
I've never had comments on my blog.
I didn't have two-way engagement
in the way that social networking
really has now.
This sort of direct connection
between the writer and the reader,
absolutely bypassing
all of the gatekeepers,
bypassing editors, bypassing critics,
bypassing the shops.
I was just blindly broadcasting,
- almost like a little radio station...
- Yes. - ... in my bedroom as it were.
Whereas now, I think it's changing,
things are a bit more collaborative,
and you can see it evolving.
It's just impossible to predict
where it's going to go.
Whatever happens next
is going to be a surprise.
Nobody will have called it
accurately.
Fantastic! Thank you so much.
And here we are, ready for your
next client. I mean, ready for...
- I'll drop you off here.
- Always a pleasure, sir!
'So, we are at an event horizon,
where publishers could disappear
'and a whole new way of experiencing
writing is in the offing.
'I asked the author Hanif Kureishi.'
Is it the same thing to read
a digital book as a physical book?
Well, I think there'll be
new kinds of books made.
Um, because people will read them
on iPads and so on,
which means that they can use
bits of film, they can use colour,
they can use drawings,
they can introduce footnotes
that go on for pages and pages.
So I think new technology
is a fantastic opportunity
for new forms, you know,
just as the invention of film,
then we had the cinema.
And digital, then we had new forms
of pop music and so on.
I think that the iPad particularly
will generate writers
to make new forms of books
and new forms of writing
that we haven't even thought of yet.
'For the last 20 years,
author Robert Coover
'has been experimenting
with interactive text.
'Is this the way of the future?
Or just one of the ways?'
Ah!
Oh, this is fantastic!
Oh, my goodness! Indifference,
punishment, interruptions.
And I'm in a cube.
'This is a 3D,
virtual reality cave -
'an amazing interface
between writer and reader.'
Oh, my goodness! This is magical!
It's all got huger, and it's all...
'Coover's work is fascinating, but
can never really have a mass market.
'It's just too expensive.'
'But at the world-renowned
MIT in Boston,
'some of the brightest and most
technologically savvy people in the world
'are trying to find out
other ways we might record
'and transmit information
in the future, for all of us.
'The researchers
at the MIT media centre
'are also experimenting with
new ways of sharing stories.'
So, what we have here is called
the never-ending drawing machine.
It's an e-book,
but an e-book of a different sort.
It's made out of paper and not only
is the book itself tangible,
but also it's possible to incorporate
tangible objects into it.
So this book is networked
and as we turn the pages...
Oh, a new page comes up!
'The idea is that people,
even miles apart,
'could interact via the book,
'adding their own images and text
'to create a communal,
interactive story.'
So, part of the idea of the project
is to make interfaces
for creative collaboration,
that go across boundaries.
So one is generational,
another one is cultural,
another one is...
Yeah, like acquired learning skills,
you know?
I could play these
with my grandfather,
though he was never trained
in computer science
or would not know how to
turn on a computer.
- But that wouldn't be a problem.
- But he can turn a page.
He can turn a page and press
a button, that's easy, exactly.
And he can just have the freedom
of using stuff that he finds familiar
in his environment.
'For the researchers here,
the key word is interactivity.
'The person reading the book
is also adding content.
'They're also experimenting with new ways
of recording and relaying information.
'For them, the senses of sight and
hearing are just part of the story.
'A truly immersive method
of communication
'would also involve
the sense of touch.'
We want to build technologies
that are not just in our world,
- but they are also intimate
with our own bodies. - Yes.
And they're connecting with us at
every millimetre, every millisecond.
'Their idea is to record
someone's movements,
'then allow a second person to feel
them, via the medium of a jacket,
'as a kind of second skin.'
And as you say,
the implications for gaming
and a narrative world
in which you can participate.
Absolutely. Imagine if you can
download your data
for your grandson,
who, 20, 30, 40 years from now
can actually live
through a day of your life.
- Oh, my God. - So you can connect
people through space and time,
and cultures and ages.
Stories are what make us human,
and we need to create
new containers to tell the stories.
It's what really drives me.
Exactly. And I suppose it's
about it all being human-shaped,
not technology-shaped.
- The technology shapes itself
to the human. - Yes.
Not the human to the technology.
And talking of shaping,
Ken is very slim and properly built
and I'm a great...
- But is it possible to try this on?
- We can try it on.
Shall I have a go?
I'd love just to get a feel.
- Let's get this here. Yeah. It's
sort of on, isn't it? - Yeah, exactly.
So, in your hands,
if you move your hands...
Oh, yes!..You will feel
as if I'm pushing you. Yes.
And it's not like I'm holding you
and moving you, it's more subtle.
Yeah. Almost like a magnet
in a magnetic field,
- that slight feeling of...
- Exactly.
'All these technologies are ways
of recording and transmitting
'feelings, ideas and stories.
'You could say that they're
writing, but not as we know it.
'They're the next generation of
communication
'for a world that is transcending
the written word.'
Even if reading and writing
were to disappear tomorrow,
I would argue that
the changes they have made to us,
technological, cultural,
intellectual,
and in terms of
the adaptation of memory
and the transmission of history,
they would remain.
We may have invented
reading and writing,
but reading and writing
have re-invented us.
But one thing that has never changed
is our eternal love of storytelling.
And that predates even
reading and writing.
And that's what I'm going to be
looking at next time.
'I'm going to introduce you
to some of my favourite writers.'
He has invented our language.
He's so ultra-modern!
To be or not to be?
That is the question.
"True wit is nature
to advantage dressed.
"What oft was thought,
but ne'er so well expressed."
A man hears what he wants to hear
and disregards the rest.
You go through life and realise
people are only hearing
a bit of what you say, because
it's the bit that suits them.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd