From Blood to Ink
This is part 1 of a 7 article series that examines the technological history and theory behind the curation of human thought and discovery.
The search for knowledge is unending. For millions of years, humans, in all of their evolutionary forms, have been observing, thinking, and testing. This unquenchable thirst to learn was vital for development and survival, but it also brought with it a dire need to preserve those learnings. History is a story of discoveries, but it is also the story of how we collected and passed on those discoveries to future generations. It’s a tale of human ingenuity and technological advancement that starts with the simplest piece in today’s grand system of collaborative thought: a human being who knows something others don’t.
Before computers, before books, and even before the written word, humans relied on each other for knowledge. If you didn’t know how to hunt, build shelter, or prepare food there was someone that did. With no written language, this knowledge had to be maintained. Transactive memory was one of the earliest forms of knowledge storage that emerged from this.
Transactive memory dictated that each person held a certain position in the group and that each time the group received new information related to that role the individual(s) in that role were responsible for holding that knowledge. This allowed members of a group to focus on their area of expertise so that they could master their craft for the good of the community and not splinter their focus on trying to remember too many things. In this sense, humans were encyclopedias on a particular subject. Yes, there was common knowledge everyone had, but to store the vital and non-trivial information humans relied on one another.
While humans made great containers for information, they could not hold them forever. Old age and death meant this information had to be preserved for the next generation. Lacking the technology and tools (like a written language) to record their insight, humans used spoken language, song, and stories to pass this information along. Just as history and cultural values were passed on by Homer orally to the ancient Greeks through the Iliad, human experts used the spoken word to transfer knowledge to a new vessel. This was not without its share of problems. Knowledge transferred this way was prone to being forgotten by the listener and omitted by the speaker. Given the circumstances, it worked wonders.
This system of individual-curated specialization maintained orally across generations was the foundation for human survival and advancement. The next phase of curation would begin with the invention of the written word.
Complex language was a major step in facilitating the curation and transfer of human understanding, but even before that images played an important part in sharing information. Paintings and rudimentary drawings on rocks, trees, and cave walls were indispensable to our early ancestors for storing and sharing discoveries. While the intention of the creator and purpose of the images are debatable, they undoubtedly indicate early efforts by humans to curate thoughts and ideas in a static place and in a way that was understandable (and transferable) to all that came across them.
These early imprints still teach us today. They have survived for thousands of years, much longer than their mortal artists. The longevity printed knowledge offered was not lost on early humans. The need to record and hold discoveries in a way not prone to death or memory loss pushed them towards turning written symbols into readable language.
Writing instruments and mediums have their own rich history. From stone and papyrus to archival paper and hard drives, the technology we use to record and preserve information has been a driving force in the development of curation techniques. With a written language, humans were now capable of holding information outside of their minds in a way that could easily be accessed by anyone. The only limit was that the reader had to be in the spot where the words were put down. Portability was the next great obstacle. Humans could put down their thoughts on a wall, a tree, or a stone but these objects were impractical to move around. If we wanted a way to save ideas that could be referenced easily we needed to refine our writing surfaces. Walls and trunks gave way to stone, clay, and bronze tablets. Useful for simple ideas and figures but still too bulky to house everything.
To hold the ever-growing human understanding of the world something lighter and more replicable was required. Egyptian papyrus and it’s later Chinese form, paper, would prove to be the solution. This medium, in the shape of scrolls and eventually modern books, was a major advancement for curation efforts. Now, complex human thought could be saved in its entirety and kept together in a smaller and lighter collection of scrolls and books as opposed to heavy tablets. The fragility of the material would still need improvement, but it was a breakthrough that allowed civilizations to get all of their knowledge out and into something that could be accessed by anyone and moved to anywhere. For all practical purposes, humankind moved from flesh and blood curation to curation with physical objects (physical curation).
This shift in curation efforts (oral to written words) would lead to the establishment of libraries as an institution to curate all of this curation. These libraries would serve as a central nexus of information. Where once you would ask another person for the knowledge they held you would now ask the librarian for access to that information. The library served as an eternally growing brain for its community. It held as much knowledge as it could collect and indexed that knowledge (similar to Google today) so that others could find it when the need arose. Even today, few libraries rival the well-remembered Library of Alexandria, whose mission at its founding was to collect all of the world’s recorded knowledge. The library would be destroyed before it could realize its goal, but it remains an important linchpin in an ongoing endeavor to curate the world’s recorded knowledge that would only be challenged by the internet two thousand years later.
Despite their portability, scrolls and texts were time-consuming and expensive to produce. This made them quite valuable and thus limited them to living inside of libraries or the homes of the wealthy.
This made them what economists refer to as a rival good. A rival good is something that when it is in use by one individual it can’t be used by others. This meant that the knowledge in a library could only be leveraged by the individual holding that scroll or book. If two people had questions that a particular text answered they would need to wait for that text to become available from that other person. The difficulty of reproducing these scrolls and books made them a challenge to gain access to, and curation without accessibility is pointless.
The introduction of the printing press and movable type would change everything. Books and scrolls that at one time had to be copied by hand could now be reproduced on a massive scale. Suddenly, curated human thought in the form of printed books was no longer a rival good. Now, everyone could access this information. The only limit was which thoughts could be published. Printing presses were expensive and printing a new book required a lot of work to set up. We had solved the problem of accessibility to thoughts once they were published but we had yet to solve the problem of publishing every thought. Publishers and patrons now became the gatekeepers to what human knowledge could be made widely available which gave them a powerful influence over curation efforts for nearly half a millennium. But the printed word was only a portion of the advancements in idea curation. A few hundred years later would bring in three more technological advancements that would expand the scope of curation greatly: recorded sound, photography, and film.
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