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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> able to communicate long distances with others who share their interests >> The elite of Ancient Rome, the people literate, with some free time, measured in perhaps the tens or hundreds of thousands.

This does not require literacy. Culture and society evolve quite easily through word of mouth alone. Traveling people, be them official word-spreaders or not, moved from one place to another very quickly. Songs spread quickly from tavern to tavern. News and culture always moved as fast a horse/runner/ship could carry it. Literacy cannot make a horse run any faster. Literacy only made communication faster once the message could move faster than a physical object. Only with long-distance communication such as semaphore and eventually electronic means. Literacy meant that culture became written down, often literally carved in stone. This codification most likely slowed its previous rapid evolution.

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Literacy in itself does not "make a horse run any faster".

But ancient literacy is correlated with more developed and bigger states (empires) whose ordinary inhabitants aren't constantly threatened with wars and enjoy certain protections of the law. Such countries also build roads and engage in extensive internal and external trade. In such a stable environment, culture is easier to cultivate. And horses on well-built roads do travel faster.

Literacy surely makes accurate and trustworthy communication much faster. Not many humans can accurately recall the amount of detailed information that can be included on a couple of sheets of paper, and even if they could, unless the messenger is known to the recipient, there's an issue of trust (written/sealed communications are generally much harder to forge).

> Literacy surely makes accurate and trustworthy communication much faster.

This is an interesting discussion. My thought is that there are quite a few variables influencing when literacy/writing becomes an important technology:

a) durability and portability of media: most is either light and degrades easily or durable but heavy and harder to transport.

b) manufacturing cost: papyrus was used for millenia in the west but was never widespread because its production was time and labor intensive. Ink and dye would be another cost. Most stuff just wasn't worth the cost of writing down.

c) population size/density and network effects: small populations wouldn't benefit much because it would be more cost effective to trasmit and preserve information orally. Similarly, large but diffuse populations wouldn't benefit much because the cost of scribes and materials would be high relative to the population served. Given that writing is a "two-sided market" (needing both a trained writer and reader) then the value of writing is somewhat proportional to the size of the network of scribes. Given that scribes are expensive, it would take some time to bootstrap the network. It seems only large and dense populations would see an economy of scale for writing.

It seems like a number of factors have to line up before writing presents a favorable economy of scale for information transfer and preservation.

> the amount of detailed information that can be included on a couple sheets of paper

The Iliad / Odyssey was a purely oral story for a long time. Oral traditions definitely included techniques that would allow any person to memorize vastly more than just a couple sheets worth. For that matter, we still have Hafiz around -- people who memorize the entire Koran and can recite it word for word. Or in non-verbal data, London cabbies with The Knowledge.

Not really quibbling with the point that literacy and writing is important, but the human brain is mutable enough that statements about what the average person "can't" do are suspect.

> The Iliad / Odyssey was a purely oral story for a long time

And it's almost certain the details got changed with each retelling! I wonder if Homer would event recognise much of our modern version of it.

>And it's almost certain the details got changed with each retelling!

As a former Classicist who studied this in grad school, I can say this is unequivocally false. Rhapsodes of the ancient world had a fairly established canon, by the time of Pisistratus it was in the form we know today. The meter and structure of the poem reinforced preserving its structure and contents so that rhapsodes could recite the poems fairly verbatim. I memorized book 1 of the Odyssey in Homeric Greek as a class assignment, it's actually not too hard, esp. if you do learn with the meter.

Hmm, well I'll defer to your expertise then, but if nothing else the language Homer used isn't even in use any more...how many people still read/listen to it in Ancient Greek? And I gather it was still many many centuries since those stories were first told before they were written down at all. I'd also think memorizing something when you have a written-down text to refer to is one thing, whereas repeating a story you've only heard told verbatim is quite another.

I suspect literacy is a necessary but not sufficient enabling technology for more rapid social and technological change. China has had pervasive literacy longer than anywhere else yet stagnated culturally and technologically due to its political conditions. Conversely the development of moveable type printing in Europe, which can only have a real effect with widespread literacy, lead to an explosion of social and technological change.

You do know that child game where you are told a story, and you have to pass it on to the next, who will have to tell it based on only your story, etc. It doesn’t need much to make absolutely no sense.

It is good for trivial messages (this is dangerous, etc), but not for anything more complex.

What you describe is not "quite easily" at all. It is more of "can sorta kinda overcome the distance, sometimes".

Songs did not spread as far nor as easily as they do it now.

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