Abstract
The decipherment of linear B writing in 1952 by Michael Ventris has thrown light on a very interesting issue: in the second millennium B.C., the Greeks had a writing system, but the amount of information they put into writing was limited. Other civilisations, including the Celts, made the same choice. A choice was made between what you memorise and what you write down; the reasons for this choice could be political and religious in nature. In the course of history, there has been often a great resistance to writing, a resistance which in most cases arose out of a form of respect for the human memory, and a strong diffidence towards storing important information outside the human brain. This resistance is certainly connected with the status of sacred object that has often been bestowed on specific writings. It is interesting and curious to observe how the problem of preserving information outside of human memory has appeared again with the introduction of computers.
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Cited by Marcel Détienne, L’invention de la mythologie, Paris 1981, pp. 78–79.
If we are to believe the anecdote handed down by tradition, cf. Lao Tzu. Tao Te King, le livre du Tao et de sa vertu, new translation followed by a commentary on the teachings of Lao Tzu, Jean Herbert and Lizelle Raymond (edd.), Lyon, 1951, p. 8.
Jean-François Billeter, L’art chinois de I’ècriture, Geneva 1989.
Giovanni Garbini, The question of the alphabet, in the volume containing contributions by various authors: The Phoenicians, Venice 1988, p. 89. Ibid, p. 102.
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© 2005 International Federation for Information Processing
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Hurst, A. (2005). Preserving information. In: van Weert, T.J. (eds) Education and the Knowledge Society. IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, vol 161. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-23120-X_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-23120-X_6
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