writing has become uh one of the most powerful means of the world uh that we live in and understand uh and it has two uh features that we would like to focus on uh originally uh it was a restricted form of meaning making and as it developed it actually became restrictive in interesting ways even as it spread all over the world as a mode of meaning making very quickly in fact today uh 90% of the world population speak one of 20 languages and all of these 20 languages have writing associated with them they're the ones that have grown and dominated and filled the space of meaning making for many countries across the globe literate civilizations end up spreading uh we have you know the spread of um uh written Chinese through East Asia we have the spread of writing systems through Central and um South America uh we have the spread of derivatives of the first writing of mes Mesopotamia so the first writing of Mesopotamia becomes um you know moves across to Egypt and becomes Hier hieroglyphics it moves into Europe the first Greek um scripts the first European scripts is a Greek script called Linear B um which we've got an example of of here in an image writing and the invention of the mechanisms like the pr printing press uh for its uh uh delivery and dissemination had a revolutionary change on life in very powerful kinds of ways it influenced the way humans were organized it influenced the way we worked it in influence the way we relate it the interesting thing is the function of writing is really only for Elites it's not for everybody um and those Elites use writing as part of a system of in equality it also serves the function of religion in chichin you know it was the only the and and in a lot of other societies it was something that the high priest did you know you couldn't come to know God but the high priests or who knew Latin or who knew um who were literate uh had this secret knowledge so it was intricately related uh to um to inequality very quickly writing became something to control meaning to control stories through standardization through canonical text famous Anthropologist Claude Ley Strauss says look these were the baleful effects of writing when writing comes it's used by to list property um it's used for taxation so if the peasants are are farming and for um uh building the kind of uh structures you can see in these images in the background of Chichen so what happens is that we have a surplus um there's terrible inequality and on the on these images of chich you can see some of this symbolic representation in the columns in these images writing uh even as earlier Socrates was seen as uh perhaps something in in in his frame of mind anyway that might have a negative effect because it would make people lazier in their thinking you know uh that their thinking Capa capacity somehow would be affected by the invention of writing now what happens with the spread of um of of writing um uh uh progressively over over several thousand years is the death of small languages so and by the way that happens in Central America and South America as well small indigenous languages are gradually taken over uh by the languages of the Meer and the Aztecs and these other larger civilizations in Europe Latin becomes uh which is the the written language becomes the dialect writes over a whole pile of smaller languages and so on and as we move further on into the modern period um uh what we have is we have the rise of the nation state so we have this image here which is the classical image of the modern nation state what nations were about were building large homogeneous populations and the uh the theorist of nationalism Ernest gildner has this very interesting way of putting it um that that individuals have to be substitutable so if you're in a particular social role you have to be substitutable you know a teacher is a teacher and a policeman's a policeman and someone who drives a bus is that and they have to be able to communicate with strangers so building these large nations with common languages becomes then a strong political agenda in the modern time in modern times and with that comes the death of small languages and of course one of the central instruments to achieve that is the school so kids come to school with different dialects different languages maybe their indigenous languages maybe their immigrant languages but the function of schooling is to teach uh literacy to teach official standard languages which everybody shares as a kind of a lingua franer so it's a process of homogenizing uh human languages now if we cast our way our minds back comparatively to uh first languages there the logic of identity was the logic of differentiation uh the logic of uh marking the World by my specific symbolic way of of naming things and now we have a reversal of that and a strong tendency towards homogenization and assimilation uh with um uh official languages uh and linguistic assimilation and in those 5,000 years since the invention of writing what we've seen is some very particular features uh attached to something that we've called the modern life world or modernity uh writing has produced uh the phenomena of what value is it's produced um knowledge that matters uh it has created rules and about the kinds of skills you need and the kinds of sensibilities in order to be a literate person and a competent uh modern person and we also produce ways of testing these values the knowledge and the skills and sensibilities and in fact it underpins the invention of writing underpins the whole edifice of the institutionalized textbook based education system that we are all a part of uh in uh the worlds in which we live