The four essays in this book are concerned with the cultural consequences of literacy in that they demonstrate that some forms of competence, highly valued in society, developed in large part as an unintended consequence of the Greek alphabetic writing system. The first essay, entitled "Spoken Sound and Inscribed Sign," discusses the…

This paper describes the unique development of media histories among developing peoples as compared to the western world's media development sequence from orality to literacy, print, film, and electronics. The fallacy of unilineal cultural evolution is presented, reviewed in terms of how it persists in current theories of media history, and then…