Written language is a unique and powerful tool. It allows us to extract knowledge from individual memory and store it elsewhere. This frees the spread of knowledge from the constraints of time and space. Whether it’s a conversation across vast distances or a dialogue spanning generations, written language builds bridges for communication. Through writing, one person can convey thoughts to countless others simultaneously, the departed can converse with the living, and the living can pass on wisdom to future generations.
Written language enables the reuse and “recall” of information—a completely new paradigm. It allows information to be organized into new architectures, categorized into fields such as history, law, business, mathematics, and logic. Regardless of the specific content, these very categories represent new technologies. The power of written language is not only evident in the preservation and transmission of knowledge (which is inherently valuable) but also in its underlying methodology, such as encoding and transforming visual cues, using symbols to represent real objects, and subsequently using symbols to represent other symbols.
Compared to spoken language, the vocabulary of written language shows astonishing expansion. For instance, any spoken language typically contains only a few thousand words, whereas English, the most widely used written language globally, has a recorded vocabulary exceeding one million words and continues to grow by thousands annually. More importantly, these words don’t exist in isolation; each word carries its own unique historical origin and evolutionary trajectory, reflecting the continuous development of human thought and culture.
Two thousand years ago, Plato once said: “For writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if you ask them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think that they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing.”
If Plato were alive in our current age of AI, what would he exclaim?