purple motes

The development of writing gave humans technology for storing knowledge and conveying it across time. But, at least in China, storing and transmitting knowledge doesn't seem to be a good explanation for the earliest writing.

The earliest corpus of Chinese writing is oracle-bone inscriptions from the Late Shang Dynasty. The Shang Dynasty arose about 3500 years ago in the Yellow River valley in the northeastern region of present-day China. To converse with ancestors, spirits, and powers, the dynastic kings and his diviners orally addressed propositions ("charges") to a specially prepared cattle scapula or turtle plastron ("bone"). The bone was then heated, and the king read a response -- "auspicious" or "inauspicious" -- from the heat cracks that appeared in the bone.

In the late Shang Dynasty (about 3050 to 3200 years ago), the divination conversation was systematically recorded. After the divination had occurred, engravers carved unto the bone the date of the divination, sometimes the place if it was unusual, and the charge. Sometimes they also recorded the king's reading, and, less frequently, a record of the actual outcome relevant to the charge. About 150,000 inscribed oracle bones from the Late Shang have been found. Hence late Shang kings had an extensive inscribed-bone record of their conversations with ancestors, spirits, and powers.

The oracle bone inscriptions cover a wide range of concerns. Roughly 7% of inscribed bones concern primarily the weather. Other charges addressed harvests, favor of ancestors, disasters, childbirth, administrative orders, hunting expeditions, and many other topics. In other words, charges are like text on Twitter, but forward-looking:

• "Today it will not rain."
• "(We) will hunt at Wu; going and coming back there will be no disasters."
• "It should be tonight that (we) perform the you-cutting sacrifice and perform an exorcism."
• "There is a sick tooth; it is not Father Yi who is harming (it/him)."
• "The Eastern Lands will receive harvest."
• "Today, yichou, we offer one penned sheep to Ancestory Xin, promise five cattle."
• "It should be Qin whom we order to inspect Lin."
• "It should be Bing whom we order to inspect Lin."
• "If we build a settlement, Di (the High God) will not obstruct (but) approve."
• "Lady Hao's (a consort of the king's) childbearing will be good."
• "(We) pray for Lady Hao to Father Yi (the king's deceased father)."

[all of the above charges are translated and presented in Keightley (2000)]

The charges address immediate, pragmatic concerns. That's not usual for divination. Preserving a record of such divination, however, is unusual.

The purpose of this record seems not to have been to record and transmit knowledge. The reading of the cracks and the actual outcome would have been highly relevant information, but these aspects of the divination often weren't recorded. Moreover, logically complementary propositions were often proposed serially. For example, an oracle bone was addressed with the charge, "It is Shang Jia who is harming the rain," and then, on the same bone, another charge, "It is not Shang Jia who is harming the rain." To avoid inconsistency, these two conversations must have been interpreted in light of each other. In addition, there's no evidence that anyone other than the king determined the readings that the oracle-bone cracks implied. Hence no one other than the king would have an incentive to study the information recorded on the bones. Of course, modern science also implies that studying these records would have no predictive value.

Why then this costly, extensive use of writing? Communication with ancestors, spirits, and powers was highly valued in ancient Chinese culture. Accumulation of inscribed bones documented the extent of the king's communication with ancestors, spirits, and powers. What specifically the bones recorded didn't matter.

Perhaps not having a life for reading lifelogging doesn't matter either. Life is good. For those that find it hard to believe, lifelogging is evidence that they're alive. On the other hand, the social value of that record is likely to be much less than the social value in ancient China of a record of communication with ancestors, spirits, and powers.

Reference:

Keightley, David N. (1999), "The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of the Late Shang Dynasty," in Wm. Theodore De Bary and Richard Lufrano, compilers, Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2'nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press) Ch. 1.

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In the nineteenth century, continuous partial attention was a burning problem:

Until the 1820s (when candle technology started to improve markedly), both wax and tallow candles needed frequent "snuffing." We commonly misunderstand the term snuffing today -- it did not mean to put a candle flame out; instead, it meant to trim the candle's wick. If one did not snuff frequently, then the wick would grow longer as the wax melted, curving over toward the small wall of solid material holding in the melted wax or tallow. The curving wick would then melt the wall, causing the molten material to flow down the candle and be lost. This phenomenon was called "guttering," and it ensured that the candle burned less efficiently and for a shorter time. Tallow candles left unattended might use just five percent of their material and gutter out within half an hour. ...the point is that reading was regularly interrupted -- perhaps every ten minutes or so -- by the need to snuff a candle.[1]

Candles early in the nineteenth century were probably about as distracting as Twitter is today. Perhaps a distinctive feature of modern life is that the admonition "stay awake, stay alert" has become unusual.

Note:

[1] Eliot, Simon (2001), "'Never Mind the Value, What about the Price?"; Or, How Much Did Marmion Cost St. John Rivers?" Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 173, 177.

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A lot of interesting thinking and experiments are now going on concerning presence in communication. Mike Gotta’s post entitled “Presence: Complex, Pervasive And Evasive” highlights the business case for presence. Which industry structure do you think is better for private investment, competition among many firms, and innovation: an industry in which firms compete to supply a commodity service like per-minute voice communication, or an industry in which firms compete to provide a “complex, pervasive, and evasive” good? My economics training suggests the latter!

Person-state definitions, attention management, and impression management are aspects of presence that shouldn’t be over-emphasized and that are probably better hidden in the design of services than presented as tasks that users must manage. In person, too active impression management goes by the name of being a phony. That would be a horrible insult to be associated with a Telco 2.0 service.

Moreover, as Craig Roth insightfully notes, if Captain Picard doesn’t have effective interruption management technology, businesses today probably should be cautious about the prospects for developing it.

A service designed for persons to use to broadcast a text message answering one simple question, “What are you doing?” produced this message:

oooooh la la! Biz is looking like a well-dressed handsome man! ^_^ Ready sweep Livvy off of her feet...again! [Twitter]

That’s not literally state information, but it does make for a strong sense of presence.

A more propitious direction for presence is better communicating persons acting in the world, expressing themselves where they are. Georgia O’Keeffe beautifully conveys this idea:

I have picked flowers where I found them.
Have picked up sea shells and rocks and pieces of
wood where there were seashells and rocks and pieces of
wood that I liked.
When I found the beautiful white bones
on the desert I picked them up and took them home too.
I have used these things to say what is to me the
wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.

[from exhibition catalogue, 1944]

Perhaps countries where persons have less experience using old-fashioned phones, and less experience using old-fashioned cameras, will more quickly embrace new communication possibilities.

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