What is Writing?

Why is writing about writing so terrible? It's the writing domain that invites the worst writing on earth: graphomaniac drivel about itself, written by professional narcissistic writers about themselves, in which they distill their inability to say anything about anything, particularly about the ability to say something. The convolutions, pretentiousness, and tedium of current ars poetica are one of the most repulsive (and worthless) manifestations of our time. Can it be done differently?

A Word in Stone and Writing in Two: The Virtual Dialogue  (Source)

What is the invention of writing? Why is it important? Not because of the writing itself. Traditions were passed on before that, orally, and therefore, like stones worn by water, they were particularly beautiful pebbles, because the wisdom of generations wore down the wisdom of the individual. It wasn't the invention of writing that was important - but the invention of writing as an act. That is, the invention of a new type of thinking, which is writing. Just as humans became human when apes learned to use tools, so the brain became a carrier of culture when it learned to use tools. And like the revolution of artificial tools of matter - this was the revolution of artificial tools of the spirit. In other words: it's a spiritual revolution. When memory was added to the machine - that is, when the memory tape was added to the automaton - it became a computer, a Turing machine. Similarly, when external memory was added to the brain, it became a new kind of thinking machine, composed of a processor (the brain) and external memory (writing).

Just as the internet and the computer themselves change the power of the brain, and become part of a single system of thinking with it, which has a natural component and an artificial component - so was writing, which was a more fundamental revolution than the information revolution, or printing. After all, what happens when we write? Why is it much easier for us to concentrate and think and be creative while writing, than while walking, for example? In fact - it's easier to be creative while walking, at the processor level. When it comes to the single creative idea - there's no need for writing. But the idea is never isolated, but rather receives its meaning from a series of ideas that come before and after it. Because the idea in itself is meaningless - only being part of a learning sequence gives it meaning.

Let's say we could come back from the future and tell us the important idea of the next century in one sentence - would we really advance humanity? It's likely that this sentence would be meaningless and incomprehensible. Similarly, if we could transmit one sentence to the past, to every era, and try to advance it - each sentence in itself would not help at all. Let's think about some knockout sentence by Wittgenstein transmitted a hundred or five hundred or two thousand years to philosophers before him. Or some sentence by Einstein. Would the statement that space-time is relative, or the phrase "philosophy of language", or any sentence from any literary work, give anything to the Greeks? Not really. What can be learned from an isolated sentence? Even "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" would lose meaning out of context. What can be done with it without the Bible that follows? - and what does writing allow us? Exactly this learning sequence.

The main problem is the brain's low working memory. Once an idea is a bit complicated, it requires enormous resources just to hold it in the brain, let alone in a working state. Writing, on the other hand, frees up working memory, in favor of physical memory, and allows new creativity (it's very difficult to remember a new idea in particular). Would I have been able to remember the entire previous paragraph? My brain would have crashed after a sentence or two. And I would have been forced to learn them by heart. And here I simply go back and continue the idea I wanted, after turning in a slightly different direction (there are always splits in thinking, and you need to choose at any given moment which direction to proceed, because I have many ideas that stem from each previous idea).

Writing allows documentation of learning and therefore continuous, fast, and efficient learning. It upgrades the brain and turns it into an intelligence with completely different capabilities - artificial ones. Writing turned the brain into artificial intelligence. It enabled a new kind of learning algorithm. There is no type of thinking that needs writing more than mathematics and arithmetic, and therefore writing began with them. That's why mathematicians need a board and eraser more than any other field, because it's really impossible to do mathematics and arithmetic without writing. Even geniuses actually write inside their heads, in their mind's eye. Mathematicians are so dependent on writing that they constantly invent new types of writing and new words - because there isn't a single idea of theirs that the brain can process without writing. Writing is an integral part of mathematical thinking - and not necessarily of mathematical memory. Writing allowed the writing (that is, creation, that is, learning) of compositions - which were then spread orally (like the Bible). Writing created the long, learning narrative, and therefore created the Bible. The Bible is the world as learning, that is, as a sequence and as history and as a great story. That's why it starts from point zero and beginning, that is, from the point of Genesis - from a single creating God (exactly like the single writer).

If so, we can understand the information revolution as a thinking revolution. The printing revolution was the invention of a new form of thinking - of writing from the outset for many, for generations, for distances. That is, the long-range loudspeaker created a new language, although ostensibly it's just amplified speech. When I write for the general public, I write differently than when I write for myself, or for the few I know and for my students and my environment, who will copy from me in a continuous transmission of the scroll. In fact, I write in a more manipulative way (the novel), more alienated, more explained - writing becomes a new kind of tool: exerting power. I operate the reader. Because I'm not writing as a private tool through close contact. I act from a distance - my thinking operates at distances of space and time. And the information revolution, of writing on a computer, wasn't really a special thinking revolution, until internet writing arrived. Ostensibly, what's the fundamental difference from printing or the personal computer? But the difference is immediacy. The difference is in shortening time and distance to zero, not in extending them as in the printing revolution. I write for here and now, and therefore texts have lost long-term meaning (in both senses - in time and space). Instead of slower and deeper thinking as in print (compared to writing, because of the delay in printing), we got faster and more superficial thinking than in writing, because there's even less delay than handwriting and manuscripts.

If so, has writing lost its ability as a thought-assisting memory, which produces culture? (Culture is a particularly long learning memory). Perhaps, but it has gained something new: the ability for immediate dialogue in writing, as in Facebook comments, or in a forum, or in email. It's much easier than before to think in writing in pairs. And this is a possibility that isn't fully utilized, due to the shallowness of the platforms (Facebook as a parable). One can think of it as a kind of immediate Gemara [Translator's note: Talmudic commentary]. The tension between two can create a kind of connection of two minds, whether in rivalry or in completion, that is, what the information revolution really allows is a kind of intercourse between minds. Thinking in partnership - and learning in partnership. This allows combining the abilities of two people into a comprehensive thinking system.

That is, in understanding new types of writing, we are less impressed by the change in distribution ability, which is a quantitative matter, but by a new type of thinking that the form of writing creates - because this is a qualitative matter. And why? Because writing is thinking. And unlike just daydreaming - it's focused learning thinking. Writing is the focus - the attention aid, and therefore allowed a much more effective type of creative thinking, and therefore writing created an ideational boom (and not because of distribution - not because of the masses, but because of the single writing genius). The act of writing is a creative act, and therefore writing creates creativity, because new writing, which stands in contrast to the act of copying, is inherently original. Thinking, on the other hand, is not necessarily original by definition - no one comes to their mind with the claim that this has already been thought, but the new written thing is justified only if it's original - if it hasn't already been written, because what's written is memory. Therefore, the very act of writing created the idea of originality, which until then did not exist at all in oral tradition. Just as in culture and technology and DNA in evolution, written memory inherently creates learning and innovation. If so, what is the true importance of writing? That it is a learning aid.

Thus we can also understand the meaning of the writing revolution called the internet. Writing on the internet becomes an immediate confrontation or argument or speech between two, or more (a possibility that existed only in speech and not in writing until the internet). Therefore, written thinking has become much more collective. From writing to, it has become writing against, and thinking against. The polemical-forceful aspect has been internalized in thinking, because unlike print, it's no longer about an imagined future audience, but a concrete recipient in the present, who is going to answer me in a minute. I write as a response, and expect a response, and usually my writing is responsive to something, and not my initiative. Therefore, responsive people, who didn't write in the past, write - and turn the discourse into responsive. Not to mention confrontational.

The collective result emerging from this responsive behavior is waves of discourse, and thinking in waves. The discourse has become a sea, and therefore nothing remains of it, according to the current technological form. Everything is washed away in the flood. This creates relentless and unstoppable pressure against the forms of writing that remained - like literature, which function like dams (collapsing). Even academic writing itself has become such a discourse, where no article will be remembered in the future, and everything is defined only in relation to responses and references (did you quote me?) and waves in the field of research. Written discourse has become chatter, gossip, babble, and speech thinking has taken over writing. Thus writing has lost its thinking advantage, and has become a trivial action. Below a certain length of writing, there is no advantage to working memory from writing. Therefore, people who know how to think in writing drown in the sea of responders in writing. Writing as thinking returns to being a solitary action, which is defeated by writing as a response, in the absence of the possibility (technical, futuristic) to combine response and thinking. This future ability will allow thinking together in a constructive way, instead of the current ability to speak together (mostly - in a destructive way). Then the network will become a brain - from a discourse and language system to a learning system.

This ability to think in many in a constructive way - is "the learning of the system", learning as a collective action, which will replace personal learning. It will happen when the discourse resembles more the Gemara and less the gossip in the synagogue, that is, when every word will be in stone - on a platform where writing each word will cost money, or will be limited to a very small number of words per day (and preferably - according to the intellectual reputation of the writer). As long as everyone can write, and the cost of writing decreases accordingly - it is devalued to zero. Illiteracy, which saved us from the writing of fools, must be replaced by technology-based elitism. In the next social network, the default should be that you can't write but only read, and only gradually with the accumulation of reputation does the ability to write increase. Just like in literature. A person who received a like from someone with reputation (Prof., known critic or important writer for example) will be able to write another word a day, in his word quota. And those who received dislikes from the initial quality core group of the network - their word quota will be reduced.

Yes, there will also be silencing, but it's preferable to chatter, which is the ultimate silencing - because it's silencing of thought. Silencing of thought leads to silencing of learning, and indeed there is a great lack of new ideas, and in 99% of the books that are appreciated today there isn't even one real innovation. Many people who have nothing to say write. The basic instinct of writing - innovation - has been lost in favor of expression, which is an idea of copying - from the inside out. But, alas, even the inside is not original for them, because it itself is a copy of the outside, and thus countless duplicated and copied people are created, who in turn create duplicated and copied texts, and so on. The idea of expression is an individualistic catastrophe, in contrast to the idea of innovation, which always takes into account the learning system - because nothing is an innovation in itself, but against the background of the learning that has already been done. Innovation is a systemic characteristic.

Hence the importance of memory for innovation, and of writing for creativity - and the damage caused by memory-less writing on Facebook to creativity. Ostensibly, memory is a conservative construct, but this is true as long as it's about copying, while writing is an oxymoronic action of "new old words": creating new memory. It's not just documentation of thinking, but connecting thinking in a developing way, from the memory in the past, in the previous sentence, forward to the future, in the next sentence. That's why people compose a book. And that's why many creative writers are creative only in writing, and not in life, and it's better for them to be silent in life itself, and not "express themselves" in interviews (because that's exactly what comes out of them in speech: what's inside, instead of innovations). Writing itself is the incubator of ideas, not the expression of ideas that have already incubated in the brain, because it allows ideas to grow organically - in text. In this sense, Facebook is like an omelet at best, and grinding chicks at worst. What platform today allows ideas to grow?