Dall'alfabeto a Internet. L'Home "littéré": Alfabetizzazione, cultura,tecnologia

This book sums up my core research on the relationship between the alphabet, the human brain, information-processing and its consequences on culture in alphabetized countries from ancient Greece and Rome to the present. It is a translation in Italian of the original French (also in German, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Chinese and Japanese, as well as Slovenian and Korean). Its basic thesis is that people's way of thinking (epistemology) depends on the way they use language and, in turn, the way people use language depends on what support is used to represent and convey language. I call this techno-psychology, to underline how much of the way people experience the world is a matter of what technologies they use to communicate. Indeed, the Greek innovation, by adding letters for vowels to the letters for consonants - borrowed from their Phoenician model - made continuous the visual representation of all the sounds of language, thus giving a much larger measure of control to the reader. In terms of neurological adaptation, the strategies required from the brain to decipher a continuous line of script emphasized a linear processing (metonymic) over the metaphoric guess-work invited by the discontinuous Phoenician model. The new power given to any reader to control language led to its appropriation, eventually to its internalization (when silent reading began) and hence to a sense of selfhood, the beginning of private identity. Greek tragedy is nothing less than a response to the crisis of the individual removed, alienated or even expelled (Oedipus) from the chorus, from the city, that is, from the community. The history of the western “persona” begins with the alphabet, emerges on the stage and will be generalized with the printing press, silent reading and the full personalization of the individual control over language. The research also develops intuitions about many other properties of the alphabet's effects on culture, such as the introduction of the scientific method, historical and geographical analyses of space and time, causality and rationality and the development of logic that found its full maturation in Cartesianism. The book goes on to examine what changes have occurred with the discovery and domestication of electricity, and the epochal revolutions introduced by mass media (radio and TV) and now instant communications from the telegraph to the Internet.