Spreading the Word Fry's Planet Word

THEY SING

'Language is one of the most amazing things that we humans do.

'It separates us from the animals,

'gives us theatre, poetry and songs.

'It shapes our identity and allows us to express emotions.'

CROWD ROARS

'It makes us laugh. It makes us cry.'

'It allows us to record our histories and imagine our futures.'

Oh, my goodness! This is magical.

In this programme,

I'm going to explore language's physical incarnation,

our greatest invention - writing.

Since its birth 5,000 years ago,

the written word has given us civilisation and technology.

I'm going to reveal how it's transformed the way we interpret

and explore our world,

how we organise our religions and governments

and how we spread our ideas and our laws.

How writing allows us to listen to the past

and to speak to the future.

But is writing here to stay, or is it just a flash in the pen?

THEY SPEAK IN THEIR OWN DIALECT

'Learning to talk, like learning to walk,

'is a natural part of growing up.

'It's something that children the world over do instinctively.'

'But while spoken language

'is an innate part of the human operating system,

'something we've been doing for maybe only 50,000 years,

'the ability to read and write is an optional extra.'

Reading and writing are not a natural state of affairs.

It's just something that's been invented

to complement utterance - spoken human language.

In fact, it's not necessary or essential for communication at all,

and there are hundreds of societies around the world

which have existed for centuries, perfectly happily,

without feeling the need to write down their language.

The Akha, here in North Thailand, is one such.

THEY SPEAK IN AKHA

'While anthropologists might attribute the lack of writing

'to the culture's self-sufficient economy,

'the Akha have their own story.

'According to myth,

'they were given writing by the first spirit,

'Un Ma, on a buffalo hide.

'But the Akha don't have a written language now,

'so what on earth happened?'

It was written down on buffalo skin?

TRANSLATION:

Oh, right! Cos of the meat.

They ate it up!

So, the guardians of the Akha alphabet ate up...

I see.

Since those days, we don't have...

-Since then, you rely on your memory.

-Yes.

HE SPEAKS IN AKHA

'Traditionally, the Akha keep in their heads

'and pass on verbally, all their culture -

'their myths, stories and their entire history,

'all the way back to their founding father, their Adam.'

And so, that's all in your head? How many generations?

Do you learn songs, as well?

'Aju, like the rest of the literate world,

'now uses writing rather than his brain to remember things.

'Rather than fight progress, he wants the next generation to learn to read and write,

'so they can preserve their culture on the page.

'Reading and writing will give them access not just to their past,

'but to that of the rest of the world.'

THEY SPEAK IN THEIR OWN DIALECT

'Writing lets us discover things

'about cultures far away in space and time.

'And some of the oldest writing is here, at the British Museum.

'So, how and why did it start?'

The British Museum has thousands of objects with writing on them,

some of them more than five millennia old.

It's a matter of intense debate amongst the curators

of the various departments here as to who has the oldest.

The Egyptologists claim that they have the edge,

while the Assyriologists, they maintain that their form -

cuneiform writing - is the oldest.

Either way, it seems that writing was not invented

for the purposes of writing love poems or novels or prayers,

but actually for the rather more mundane purpose

of taxation and accountancy.

'As societies grew and flourished in the cradle of civilisation,

'today's Iraq, so did the need for bureaucracy and record-keeping.

'Who owes what to whom?

'This early clay tablet records the payment of workers in beer.'

'Behind the scenes at the museum,

'Dr Irving Finkel, Keeper of the Department of Assyriology,

'is giving some students a lesson

'in writing cuneiform the traditional way -

'on a piece of clay, with a reed.

'I'm attempting to write my name.'

So, an upright like that and then...

..that and that. Sort of more... Not quite. It's a bit too big.

-Well, it's assertive.

-Yeah, it is.

And then, one upright.

'The first teachers of writing used to beat their students.

'I hope Dr Finkel doesn't subscribe to such violent methods.'

Stephen, as you know, cuneiform writing

is the oldest form of writing in the history of the world.

-I knew that.

-Don't let anybody dissuade you of any other truth.

It began in ancient Iraq

and various remarkable things have to be stressed.

Firstly, that the people who invented writing

had no idea what was going to be the consequence.

They did it for local, bureaucratic reasons -

they had to keep books and accounts on incoming and outgoing goods.

That's how it all began.

Nobody had a vision of giving writing to the world.

That it was going to end up with Shakespeare and Proust

-and Barbara Cartland.

-Precisely.

But once it started in the world, it never stopped.

And like a snowball, it grew and grew and grew,

until it's become the kind of intellectual prop of homo sapiens.

So, it's a very significant thing.

In our department to do with Ancient Mesopotamia,

we have the earliest evidence.

So, what I brought firstly to show you is a real tablet.

This was written by a schoolboy in about 1700 BC.

-Good Lord!

-The most wonderful thing is there is one example of this.

A tablet like this - on the back, there is a caricature of the teacher

and this teacher has a goofy kind of tooth

and a stupid expression on his face

and this is clearly a pupil who is fed up to his back teeth.

-So, this is his rough book, his exercise book?

-Yeah.

In my view, there's something really important to be learned,

which is, the human beings who made these things

are absolutely close to us.

There are voices singing out of these apparently dead objects.

Exactly.

The dazzling wonder of the human mind,

as we know it today, forcefully,

in my view, is there to be plucked out of these documents.

'Of course, cuneiform wasn't just used to write bills and accounts.

'In no time at all, people started writing poems,

'love letters and legends.

'Written stories, like the Epic Of Gilgamesh

'give us a glimpse into a different world.

'A world where writing itself was a source of power.

'Writing allowed rulers to lay down the first laws,

'send secret messages in battles

'and write their own versions of events.

'Only a few highly trained scribes

'could read and write this complex script,

'but in doing so, they took humans from prehistoric times

'into the pages of history.'

Writing was developed separately and independently all over the world

and by 1200 BC,

it was flourishing in India, China, Europe and Egypt.

Now, while some ancient scripts have yet to be deciphered

even to this day,

the language of the pharaohs, hieroglyphs,

has been successfully translated and transcribed

thanks to the Rosetta Stone.

'The same inscription on this stone is written three times,

'in Ancient Greek, Egyptian Demotic script

'and the original Egyptian hieroglyphs.

'These three scripts allowed hieroglyphs

'finally to be deciphered.'

The phrase "Rosetta Stone"

has become a kind of metaphor for anything that is a key part

in the process of decoding, translating

or solving a difficult problem.

But all written language is a form of code

and without the ability to read,

it just becomes as incomprehensible

as the marks on this rock are, to me, at least.

You probably learnt to read and write as I did,

by using letter tiles,

or you had those sort of strips of paper

round your primary school classroom

with A for apple and B for bear and C for carthorse, or whatever it was.

The amazing thing about the system of an alphabet

is you don't have learn symbols,

you just learn these individual letters that make the sounds.

Once you do, anything is possible.

You can just make up all kinds of fantastic phrases.

I adore playing with... Oh, look. Look what we can have here.

Playing with letters and words.

The alphabet allowed what you might call

a democratisation of reading and writing.

And the alphabet that we use came to use via the Romans,

from that great, democratic civilisation,

Ancient Greece.

'The Greeks were famous for epic stories.

'Homer's Iliad and Odyssey told tales

'of wars and adventures all around the Mediterranean.

'But Homer himself didn't write.'

Some romantically-minded scholars

have proposed that a brilliant contemporary of Homer

invented the alphabet in order to record the poet's oral epics,

The Iliad and The Odyssey.

It seems unlikely, but Homer himself does give us a clue

as to the origins of writing.

In The Iliad and The Odyssey, he mentions the Phoenicians,

traders who travelled the Mediterranean in ships.

'The Phoenicians were the great merchants of antiquity

'with ports in modern day Syria, Lebanon and Israel,

'and all over the Mediterranean.

'But they didn't just transport goods.

'They introduced a whole new way of writing -

'the alphabet.

'Theirs was the mother of all alphabets,

'including our own.'

You're an extraordinarily accomplished fellow.

You don't just dig around in sites, you actually can write Phoenician.

Maybe you can show me the alphabet? Give me a sense of how it looks.

-Ah, you've got a...

-Yeah.

So, just for example,

the letter Aleph in Proto-Canaanite or Canaanite script,

it was in the shape of a head of an ox.

-Sorry for my drawing.

-Fair enough.

But later, it was transformed in Phoenician,

early Phoenician, into something like this, which is the shape...

-And, of course, if you transform it in the right direction...

-Yeah.

..you get the Alpha or the A or other languages.

In later Phoenician inscription, was this symbol,

sometimes it even had a small iris.

So, basically, it was transformed into the Omicron,

the little O.

'For the Phoenicians, the more people who could read and write,

'the better.

'The alphabet allowed them to communicate

'and deal more effectively with foreign trading partners.

'Spreading the word made sound economic sense.'

The important point about the Phoenician culture

is that, being a trading culture,

it wasn't interested in leaving permanent religious memorials in writing,

it was more about taking writing around

as a way of facilitating the trade that was the basis of their...

Therefore, they got such a bad press because in the Bible,

they are the bringer of foreign, idolatrous, er, cults.

The foreign idols - Jezebel the queen, the Phoenician queen.

So, these people have never written history,

but they got all the bad press from everybody.

They wrote the records, but they don't survive.

It's very likely.

It's very likely that much was on papyrus and was lost.

'Papyrus, like the alphabet, was another Phoenician export.

'We get our word "paper" from it.

'The Greeks gave a collection of papyrus a new name - byblos,

'from which we get our word "Bible".

' "God, in mysterious Sinai's awful cave

' "To man the wondrous art of writing gave",

'wrote Blake in his book Jerusalem.

'Writing allowed the priests and the rabbis

'to set in stone their beliefs.

'Once written, customs became religious laws

'and the word of God could not be edited.

'Writing has allowed one religion, Judaism,

'to last virtually unchanged for millennia.'

Behind me is the Western or Wailing Wall,

one of the most sacred places in all Judaism.

The written word is integral to worship here.

Observant Jewish men have strips of paper

with words from Deuteronomy and Exodus on them

and these are carried in little boxes here called phylacteries,

which they have strapped to their head and to their left arm

as they pray.

Other worshippers write down prayers to God on scraps of paper

and push them into the cracks and crevices of the wall behind,

and it's forbidden to remove them.

Twice a year, the rabbi of the Wall

takes them and buries them in the Mount of Olives.

It's as if the writing itself is sacrosanct

and imbued with a special power,

and when talking about the power of words in religion

you absolutely cannot ignore Islam.

Just behind the Western Wall, yards from it,

is the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site in Sunni Islam.

It's covered in writings,

in inscriptions from the Islamic holy book, the Koran,

and for Islam the Arabic script is more than just

a writing system invented by man - it's a gift from God.

In fact, one of the sayings of the prophet is that

the ink of a scholar is holier than the blood of a martyr.

Now, it may be that the Arabic script plays second fiddle to Hebrew

here in Israel, but on the world stage it's a very different story

and in fact Arabic script is second only to our own Roman alphabet for use.

The spread of religion

and the spread of writing have gone hand-in-hand,

and, with writing so fundamental to faith,

it's not surprising that people go to such lengths

to protect and preserve the written words of their gods.

Here in Jerusalem there's the aptly named Shrine Of The Book,

where some of the most precious religious writings are on display,

but even in these special and carefully climate-controlled conditions,

some of the older texts are in danger of being lost to us forever.

The most famous documents displayed here are the dead Sea Scrolls,

fragments of biblical texts and religious writings from the time of Christ.

The scrolls lay hidden for nearly two millennia,

until a Bedouin shepherd stumbled upon them in 1946.

They are believed

to be the discovery of the 20th century.

We are talking about a corpus of over 900 manuscripts,

comprising all of the books of the Bible.

These are the oldest copies of the Bible that we have, 2,000 years old.

These ancient texts are so fragile that only four

highly trained researchers from the Israel antiquities authority

are allowed actually to handle them.

What Lynn is going to show you now is a sample of the book of Psalms.

-Oh, goodness! That's the real thing, isn't it?

-Yes.

You're looking at it upside down, but this is...

It might as well be upside down to me,

but if you want to turn it round the right way!

We have about six such plates, six such pieces,

and we keep them as they were found.

If you look closely here, even if you can't read Hebrew,

every place the name of God is written exactly, the yodh, Yahweh,

it is written in what we call Paleo-Hebrew,

which is the Hebrew of first Temple times.

So, an ancient Hebrew, and older Hebrew.

And that's God, God, God, every time,

-and there's quite a lot of him, obviously.

-Yes.

-He features quite highly.

-Right. Please don't touch.

-Sorry, I was touching the glass, wasn't I?

-Yes.

'These documents are so precious that even touching the glass is forbidden,

'and the next scroll is all about rules and regulations.

'It's the Ten Commandments.'

This is the only copy that contains all of the Ten Commandments.

Oh, my goodness!

Is this the oldest record of the Ten Commandments?

-This is the oldest record of the Ten Commandments.

-Wow, amazing.

So, that alone would be the most priceless...

-Right, right.

-..document, isn't it? Amazing.

Every child or every grown-up,

when you say the Ten Commandments, knows what you're talking about.

And breaks one of them every day!

And breaks one of them every day, and these are 2,000 years old.

That is extraordinary, extraordinary.

'These ancient words are now being protected

'with space age technology - spectral imaging.

'By photographing the scrolls under different wavelengths of light,

'new sections of the text are made visible.'

Oh, yes. It's even becoming clear in the dark...

Goodness me.

'Once digitised, all 900 fragments of the scrolls will be

'made available online to scholars and members of the public.'

Fantastic.

Isn't it wonderful to think something so old,

so - I won't say primitive -

but the dawn of writing and everything,

is dependent on our age of the most extraordinary technological advances

in order to preserve it? It's rather splendid,

the old meeting new like that.

Yes, writing utterly changed the human world.

With writing we could preserve our myths, our stories and our laws.

The alphabet, whether Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek or Roman,

allowed more and more people to read and write,

but there was yet to come another major revolution in writing

that would spread the word further than ever -

printing.

'Now, you might think that printing started in Europe in 1450

'with Johannes Gutenberg,

'but this revolutionary technology - like gunpowder, the compass

'and papermaking - was invented in China nearly 400 years earlier.'

Hi, hello. I'm Stephen, Stephen Fry.

Nice to see you.

Can you make me one of these chops, with my name?

'Once carved, block printing is much quicker

'than handwriting each complex character,

'but there's a reason why printing didn't take off in China,

'and that is the sheer volume of characters -

'literally thousands of them.'

Chinese is one of the oldest written languages in the world,

and we all know these extraordinary characters or ideograms,

they're familiar almost as works of art.

To the Chinese, they are the start of a lifelong learning process,

because you have to learn each one, each one has a particular meaning.

And the key difference between Chinese

and almost all the other languages of the world, certainly ours,

is that there's no hint as to how you say them.

What's that like? Well, behind me you can see the number 60.

That doesn't tell you to say "sixty" if you're English you say "sixty",

if you're French you say "soixante",

if you're German you'd say "sechzig", and so on.

It's a symbol.

Imagine that all the numbers from 0 to 2,000 had a separate symbol.

You'd have to learn them all, and there's no hint how to say them.

'Unlike most other writing systems,

'which phonetically use symbols or letters

'to represent the sounds that make up words,

'Chinese characters, or logograms, represent whole words.

'I'm given a cursory lesson in how to write this complex script

'by entrepreneur philanthropist extraordinaire Sir David Tang

'and his calligrapher friend, Johnson.'

Pictograms are basically little pictures,

and Chinese words are composed of radicals,

which are the roots that you use all the time,

the small pictures you use all the time to compose words.

For example, this word, "moon", it is a stylised picture of the moon

and this word for "brightness" is a composite

of two radicals - the sun and moon.

So it goes on like that.

So, now, the ones I think I know, I've seen, anyway, is this China?

Oh, look, I've got one of these brush pens.

I know, I'm doing it wrong, but basically that.

That will show you up as a very ill-educated boy,

because the order in which you do the stroke is critical.

Whenever people see... My uncle, if he sees me

writing a word in the wrong order, he would immediately chastise me

and say, "You uneducated boy, don't you know how to write that character?"

So, the proper way is one stroke,

two stroke, three and four.

There is no other way of writing this character.

And the strokes are very important,

because that is the way in which you look up a word.

This word is "wood",

it looks like a tree.

And you add two more...

That's "full of trees".

And you yet add two more, which makes five...

That's a forest.

Brilliant.

'Traditionally, Chinese children have had to learn

'the meaning of thousands of different characters.

'The complexity of Chinese script meant that

'when the Communist revolution took place in 1949,

'less than 20% of the population could read.'

So, Mao Tse-tung, the great leader,

the scary leader of China for so many years,

decided that he would institute a new way of rendering Chinese

into a sort of phonetic alphabet, a romanisation, as it's called.

'The challenge was to represent the many tones of spoken Mandarin

'with just 26 letters of the Roman alphabet.

'The system that was adopted was called pinyin.

'Pinyin allows children to learn the sounds of words

'and their meanings via the phonetic Roman alphabet.

'It acts as a stepping stone

'towards learning the thousands of characters.'

CHILDREN READ ALOUD TOGETHER

'The man who invented pinyin, Zhou Youguang, is now 106

'and is hailed as a national treasure,

'but is incredibly modest about his achievements.

Is pinyin one of the great

achievements of the revolution, do you think?

IN ENGLISH:

No?

'At the onset of Mao's revolution,

'literacy rates were running at 20%.

'Within two decades that had increased fourfold.'

Was it ever your aim, or is it now your aim,

for pinyin to take over from the Chinese character?

THEY LAUGH

'Pinyin has transformed how people in China use technology.

'A traditional Chinese typewriter had over 2,000 characters.

'It was slow and unwieldy to use.

'But by using pinyin on computers and smartphones, people can find

'the right Chinese character without having them all on a keyboard.'

So, on this phone I can choose pinyin. Now, if I type,

let's say a word we know, "Beijing".

That one there or that one there or that one there...

That's the point, that allows you to use the Roman alphabet

to find the characters, otherwise it would be impossible.

'So, it is the simplicity of the alphabet,

'and the ability easily to rearrange letters,

'that gives it its potency as a tool for spreading the word.'

Johannes Gutenberg's great innovation

was to combine the Chinese invention - block printing -

with typography - the art and technique of arranging type moveably.

Movable type freed the written word from the drudgery

of hand-scribing and allowed it to take flight in printed texts.

There's something magical about a bound volume of printed text.

I can never forget the moment I first saw a novel I'd written

that had arrived from the printers.

I put it on the table and I looked at it

and I lowered my eyes to its level, I sniffed it, I opened it,

I walked and circled it, and I simply couldn't believe

that something I had written could end up

as that magical thing - bound, printed text, a book.

Printing would, after Gutenberg, unleash knowledge

and new ways of thinking that would change everything.

'The city of Norwich has a long history of printing.

'It was the first town in Britain to have a provincial newspaper.'

This ivy-clad, willow-lined stretch of the river Wensum

in the shadow of Norwich Cathedral

was once, hard to believe as it may be,

the centre of a kind of Silicon Valley of Europe.

Because here was a thriving and prosperous printworks,

and that was the industry that changed the world.

'Now all remains is the John Jarrold Printing Museum,

'run by retired experts from the industry. They're going to help me

'type-set a poem written by Chaucer,

'the first English author to be set in print.'

I believe that England's first great poet, Geoffrey Chaucer,

would rather have liked a printing press.

He died just around the time that Gutenberg was being born,

so he missed the print revolution.

But he certainly gave us indication that he was rather fed up

with the sloppiness of those who copied out his works for readers.

In fact, in one of his great poems, Troilus and Cressida, in the envoi,

the bit where he sends his book out to the public,

he sort of makes a request that it isn't too badly mangled.

He says, "For there is so great diversity in English

"and in writing of our tongue,

"so pray I God that none miswrite thee, little book."

"Nee the mysmetre for defaute of tonge

"and read whereso thou be or else sung,

"that thou be understonde,

"God I beseech. But yet to purpose of my rather speech."

In other words, he hoped that people would find some way

of spelling all the different words at least in such a manner

that it was understood by those who were going to listen or read it.

And that's what printing allowed.

'I'm going to print Chaucer's envoi

'with the help of typesetter David Skipper.'

What's the plan?

Well, this is the composing case with the characters,

capitals and lower case.

Is that why we say upper case and lower case?

Why you say upper case and lower case is that the capitals

used to be in the upper case on the frame,

-and the small letters used to be in the lower case.

-Of course.

How long did it take to train, how old were you when you started?

I was 16 when I started.

-So it was a proper apprenticeship?

-And I did five years, yes.

-Coo.

So, you pick the character up, you feel for the space on top

and you put it in the stick.

Oh, I see.

"And for there..." We need another E, don't we?

Well, I was doing a piece of text that I saw...

Oh, it's a Chaucerian spelling, is it?

Of course, so we don't need another E.

Let's have a look, what have we got here,

"And for ther is so gret diversite."

-"Is so gret," and "gret" doesn't have an A in it.

-No.

Oh, you've memorised it!

'English in the Middle Ages was incredibly diverse.

'Dialects of different regions had different words for the same thing,

'and different spellings.

'When Caxton brought the printing press to Britain in 1476,

'he was faced with a dilemma.

'He couldn't print all the different arbitrary spellings

'that were spread around the country.

'By setting words in print,

'Caxton started to make the English language more stable.'

'And printed books spread these changes across the country.'

He's hoping that when this poem goes out in the world

no-one will miscopy it or miswrite it.

Miswrite, I see, in that sense.

It reminds one of the World Wide Web, really,

that in 1993 Tim Berners-Lee creates this new system, the World Wide Web,

for linking text across different computers,

and within what seems a heartbeat

there are billions of pages of World Wide Web.

-When things take off, they really do take off, don't they?

-Yes.

-And when you ink the type, you do it diagonally.

-I noticed that.

Yeah, because it doesn't push it over so much.

And quite firm, but not too firm.

And then the other way, then you get all the corners.

That's enough.

Then you just check that that's all pushed up like that.

-And I'll get a piece of...

-Two pieces of card.

I notice you use the yellow paper to go on top.

That's right, a couple of sheets just to give a bit of impression.

I see, OK.

-Pop your first one on, that's it.

-Nice and straight-ish.

-Then that goes on like that?

-That's right.

-Just one roll?

-One roll, straight across.

-Ooh!

-Still magical.

-Then carefully lift it off.

And, voila!

That's brilliant!

I think Chaucer would be thrilled at that.

And it looks like proper printing, doesn't it? It looks really...

-It is proper printing!

-That's what I mean!

And you can tell!

'With printing, the written word truly began to spread.

'Printed books, like the Phoenician alphabet millennia before,

'democratised knowledge.

'Reading was no longer just an activity for the elite,

'but something that ordinary people could afford to learn to do.'

Printing didn't just give rise to greater literacy,

it changed people's very attitude towards learning and knowledge.

Open enquiry and questioning of received wisdom greatly increased,

and the booksellers of Paris have long been part of

a kind of literary underworld, spreading subversive ideas

by printed pamphlets, books, leaflets and newspapers.

The printed word fostered a republic of letters, the age of reason -

the Enlightenment.

'In London, Oxford, Vienna, Edinburgh, Warsaw and Paris,

'like-minded thinkers congregated to read as well as to learn from

'and debate with each other in taverns or coffee houses.

'One of the oldest and most famous is the Cafe Procope.

'This was the haunt of intellectual giants like Rousseau, Voltaire,

'Franklin, Jefferson and Diderot. So it seems like a good place

'to meet Enlightenment scholar Dr Kate Tunstall and find out about

'the book that embodies the Enlightenment project -

'Diderot's Encyclopaedia.'

It's an encyclopaedia, it's an Enlightenment project,

so it's covering human knowledge in a rational, ordered way,

and presumably the world of man in letters and music and poetry,

-but also the world of nature and science?

-Yes.

Could Diderot... Was he a master of those subjects as well?

He was a kind of spider at the centre of a web,

where he was receiving articles from all kinds of people.

There were about 140, 150 contributors,

and Diderot receives, we think, all of these articles

and produces a whole lot of them himself and needs to coordinate this.

It obviously relied on a man with an extraordinary mind,

as you say, like a spider in a web,

to control all these lines of thought and all these cross-disciplines.

Yeah, you can get those things wrong.

Whereas on the web you can alter those things as you go,

because it hasn't been printed, as soon as it's been printed,

if you've forgotten to put the cross reference in, you're in trouble.

'Diderot's aim for his encyclopaedia was to assemble

'each and every branch of human knowledge, creating a volume

'that had the power to change men's common way of thinking.

'His project was, in a strictly secular way,

'as ambitious as the Bible had been.'

So, a really extraordinary achievement,

and not just a sober setting in stone of world knowledge,

-but a kind of mischievous...

-Very mischievous.

..undermining of the previous church, the ecclesiastical world.

-Shall we look something up?

-Oh, do, give me some examples.

I want to tell you my favourite article, which is,

"Aguaxima, Natural History," in brackets afterwards,

"Brazilian plant."

"That's all this article says about it," I'm quoting.

"And I wonder who such a description is made for.

"It cannot be for people who live in the country,

"because they know what aguaxima is and that it grows in their region.

"It would be as if you'd said to a Frenchman that pears grow in France.

"It's not for us, either, because

"what do we care that there's a plant in Brazil called aguaxima?

"This article leaves ignorant people just as ignorant as they were before.

"It teaches us nothing,

"and so, if I have decided to mention this plant,

"it's just to indulge certain kinds of readers who would rather

"find nothing of interest in an article of a dictionary,

"or indeed something perfectly stupid,

"than not find the word in the dictionary at all."

-That's fantastic!

-That's the end of it.

You imagine him late at night and he's had "agave" or something,

and "Aguaxima, why should I bother?!

"But now that I've got the slip of paper that says it's a plant in Brazil, I can't throw it away,

"I promised to write an encyclopaedia."

-But he feels it's a bit stupid just to say "plant in Brazil".

-Exactly!

That's a fabulous insight into of the workings of his mind.

The project to describe all human knowledge and all sciences,

all crafts in these volumes is an extraordinary project, yeah.

'Printing led to an accumulation of knowledge, and new ways of thinking.

'It triggered revolutions in agriculture, industry and science.

'And we had more and more books. But what to do with them?

'The answer was to build more libraries.'

Almost everything I am I owe to libraries.

When I was a child there were no great libraries around,

certainly nothing like this, but we did have this thing called

the mobile library, a van that would come once a fortnight, I think,

and I would wait for it like a child waiting for an ice cream van.

And I would get on and get my supply of books

and they would last me two weeks.

Then when I was older I could get to Norwich, the local big city,

and I would spend hours and hours and hours there.

It's like a will o' the wisp, one book lights another book

which lights another one, which lights another one.

I suppose libraries still, for me, have this extraordinary charge.

When I get in one I feel this buzz, it's almost sexual,

there's something about the fact that behind all these bound copies, there are voices,

there are people murmuring to you, seducing you,

dragging you into their world. These are wonderful, magical places.

I suppose, if I have a campaign that I'm really behind,

it's that of saving our libraries.

Because everyone surely has the right to access the voices of the past.

'Although a Cambridge man, I'm exploring

'one of the oldest and most impressive libraries in the world -

'Oxford University's library, the Bodleian.

'No-one, no matter how important, can actually borrow books

'from this library, and to become a reader, I have to pledge an oath.'

"I hereby undertake not to remove from the library

"or to mark, deface or injure in any way,

"any volume, document or other object

"belonging to it or in its custody..."

'The oath was intended to protect the 11 million books

'and countless priceless manuscripts that are housed here.'

So here is a fantastic transition between manuscript and print.

You have hand work for the illumination

and you have print to print the main part of the text,

but it's on vellum.

And so to Ferdinand of Naples,

who may well have felt slightly uneasy

about the new technology of print -

this would have been much more familiar to him.

'But these days, the library has another challenge -

'how to stay relevant in a digital age.

'While the internet has many mundane uses, from booking holidays

'to doing our weekly grocery shop, it also has a colossal impact

'on the way we consume words and knowledge.

'We can access, almost instantaneously,

'an enormous repository of information

'at the mere click of a button or swipe of a finger.'

What marks a great library out is how the collections are used,

how access is provided, and the kinds of environments,

both physical and virtual, that you're able to provide scholars

and, you know, the whole interested public, with access to information.

This great archive that we're responsible for.

And the whole library world is collectively responsible for.

-It really needs to be used to be, you know, meaningful.

-Yeah.

Will you move, in the next hundred years,

away from receiving atomic matter? And will you ask publishers,

instead of providing you with physical books...?

The process has already begun and is driven by the publishers.

So there are many publishers who only publish electronically.

So we have to do digital preservations.

So you have library shelves, but do you also have racks of servers?

We certainly do.

We also have staff whose job it is to keep stuff safe.

To keep the bits alive, so that scholars in 400 years' time

will be able to access the information that's been produced now

just as we're able to access information printed by the great scholars.

Yes, it's a different expertise.

'We're producing and consuming more and more words in a digital form.

'But do our technological advances mean that the printed version

'of the book will become as moribund as the clay cuneiform tablet?

'Professor Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University Library,

'is an expert on the history of books.'

I have been invited to so many conferences

on "the death of the book",

that I'm convinced it's very much alive.

And we have statistics to prove it.

Each year, more books are produced than the previous year.

There was a dip during the recession, but next year,

there will be one million new titles produced worldwide.

And yet at the same time, more digital works are coming out

and the future is decidedly digital.

But I think we're living in a time of transition,

in which the two media co-exist.

And I think that's what makes it so exciting.

And they'll continue to co-exist?

One thing we've learnt in the history of books,

which is a huge, expanding field,

is that one medium does not displace another.

So, as you know, the radio did not displace the newspaper.

Television did not kill the radio.

And the internet did not destroy television, and so on.

So I think, actually, what's happening now

is that the electronic means of communication,

all kinds of hand-held devices on which people read books,

are actually increasing the sales of ordinary printed books.

The same number of people are reading more, one or the other?

I think both. I think both. But that, I can't absolutely prove.

However, it's certain, I think, that a lot of people

use hand-held electronic devices for one kind of reading

and use a codex for another kind of reading,

and that the interest and availability of books online

is getting people more excited about reading in general.

So I think it's a fascinating moment,

when reading itself is undergoing a change.

'I like to have a foot in both camps -

'the shiny new digital world of technology,

'and the traditional path to knowledge,

'which is embodied by the library.

'I do hope that libraries survive. They're more than just buildings

'in the same way that books are more than just print and paper.'

As the poet, philosopher and political theorist John Milton said,

books are not absolutely dead things,

they do contain a potency of life.

"He who destroys a book, kills reason itself."

Perhaps that's why, as we all know, one of the first acts of a tyrant

is to destroy a library and to burn books.

They want to control literature,

and the elitists want to hoard the power and the knowledge

that is contained in books.

'But digital words cannot be burned,

'and myriad connections of the web make online information mercurial.

'The internet is not only radically transforming

'our way of storing what we write,

'it is bringing about a new raft of changes in what is written,

'and who writes it. A man who has pioneered

'our exploration of this new technological frontier

'is the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales.'

When we look back at the history of the encyclopaedia,

Diderot, the French enclopaedist,

the basic philosophy of Wikipedia is essentially the same.

They had the idea of collecting the world's knowledge

and making it more accessible to more people.

And they did an amazing job.

But one of the problems the traditional encyclopaedia form

always had is that once it's done and you publish it, it's done.

And it's really hard to revise, really hard to update.

Whereas the next edition of Wikipedia happened since I started this sentence!

One of the reasons Wikipedia can update so quickly

is that it's written by the public,

rather than a select group of editors.

That whole process just couldn't exist in the past.

You know, it was a one-way medium.

A few people wrote and everybody else read.

Now everybody's participating in the writing.

And I think you just can't dismiss that as, you know...

It's one thing to read a book

and feel like you understand political philosophy,

it's another to go out and have a discussion or debate about it

and realise how little you actually knew,

how much deeper and richer your understanding is

with other people discussing things with you.

Wikipedia is a part of the long-term enlightenment trend.

It's part of this idea that everyone should have access to knowledge,

that democratisation of information is good for the world.

One type of search people do is they just want to know something.

You know, you hear on the news, "In Azerbaijan..." and you think,

"Oh, Azerbaijan, I sort of know where that is..." And you just go and you look it up.

And you go and say, "OK, now I understand what the situation is there" and those kinds of things.

That's a very human impulse, the desire to know things.

This democracy of the web can have dramatic results.

Knowledge is power. And combined with the widespread use of texting,

tweeting, and social media sites,

information can no longer be so easily controlled

by a ruling elite.

It is in the hands of the masses - "demos".

The flames of the Arab revolutions were fuelled, fanned and organised

by writers on the web. The power of the blog is that it can be

about everything, and by everyone.

Yes, politics, food, music,

and, of course, sex.

I'm picking up Dr Brooke Magnanti, who blogged about her experiences

as a lady of the night, under the nom de plume "Belle de Jour".

-Hello, Stephen.

-Hello. Hop in.

'Brooke's blogs proved so popular

'they were published in book form, as "Belle de Jour".'

What gave you the idea of blogging what, for most people,

would be a very secret part of their life, joining the sex industry?

Well, it seemed quite natural, when I started doing something

that I couldn't really openly speak with my friends about.

And I thought, there's some absolutely brilliant, funny things

that are happening, I'd love to be able to share it with someone.

So it seemed natural to me to start blogging about it.

You were being both literary -

I think that's what astonished people - and frank,

about something that was mostly covered up.

Do you think if the internet had not been invented,

you would have written a diary anyway, in the old-fashioned way?

Probably. The neat thing about blogs and one of the things I love,

-is that they're in reverse order.

-Yes.

So, in the past, if you pick up somebody's diary,

you start on day one of when they start writing and they explain things

and introduce characters and this and that. With the blog,

you're reading what just happened. There's this immediacy of,

"Who's that person? Why did they say that? I've got to find out."

And it's almost addictive in that way.

'Belle de Jour became so popular that it was adapted for television.

'It acquired a life of its own

'and became something more communal and interactive.'

It's changing all the time. For instance, when I started my blog,

-commenting was unheard of.

-Yes.

-Commenting didn't exist.

I've never had comments on my blog. I didn't have two-way engagement

in the way that social networking really has now.

This sort of direct connection between the writer and the reader,

absolutely bypassing all of the gatekeepers,

bypassing editors, bypassing critics, bypassing the shops.

I was just blindly broadcasting,

-almost like a little radio station, in my bedroom, as it were.

-Yes.

Whereas now, I think it's changing, things are a bit more collaborative,

and you can see it evolving.

It's just impossible to predict where it's going to go.

Whatever happens next is going to be a surprise.

Nobody will have called it accurately.

Fantastic! Thank you so much.

And here we are, ready for your next client. I mean, ready for...

-I'll drop you off here.

-Always a pleasure, sir!

'So, we are at an event horizon, where publishers could disappear

'and a whole new way of experiencing writing is in the offing.

'I asked the author Hanif Kureishi.'

Is it the same thing to read a digital book as a physical book?

Well, I think there'll be new kinds of books made.

Um, because people will read them on iPads and so on,

which means that they can use bits of film, they can use colour,

they can use drawings, they can introduce footnotes

that go on for pages and pages.

So I think new technology is a fantastic opportunity

for new forms, you know, just as the invention of film,

then we had the cinema.

And digital, then we had new forms of pop music and so on.

I think that the iPad particularly will generate writers

to make new forms of books and new forms of writing

that we haven't even thought of yet.

'For the last 20 years, author Robert Coover

'has been experimenting with interactive text.

'Is this the way of the future? Or just one of the ways?'

SWOOSHING

Ah!

Oh, this is fantastic!

Oh, my goodness! Indifference, punishment, interruptions.

And I'm in a cube.

'This is a 3D, virtual reality cave -

'an amazing interface between writer and reader.'

Oh, my goodness! This is magical! It's all got huger, and it's all...

'Coover's work is fascinating, but can never really have a mass market.

'It's just too expensive.'

'But at the world-renowned MIT in Boston,

'some of the brightest and most technologically savvy people in the world

'are trying to find out other ways we might record

'and transmit information in the future, for all of us.

'The researchers at the MIT media centre

'are also experimenting with new ways of sharing stories.'

So, what we have here is called the never-ending drawing machine.

It's an e-book, but an e-book of a different sort.

It's made out of paper and not only is the book itself tangible,

but also it's possible to incorporate tangible objects into it.

So this book is networked and as we turn the pages...

Oh, a new page comes up!

'The idea is that people, even miles apart,

'could interact via the book,

'adding their own images and text

'to create a communal, interactive story.'

So, part of the idea of the project is to make interfaces

for creative collaboration, that go across boundaries.

So one is generational, another one is cultural,

another one is...

Yeah, like acquired learning skills, you know?

I could play these with my grandfather,

though he was never trained in computer science

or would not know how to turn on a computer.

-But that wouldn't be a problem.

-But he can turn a page.

He can turn a page and press a button, that's easy, exactly.

And he can just have the freedom

of using stuff that he finds familiar in his environment.

'For the researchers here, the key word is interactivity.

'The person reading the book is also adding content.

'They're also experimenting with new ways of recording and relaying information.

'For them, the senses of sight and hearing are just part of the story.

'A truly immersive method of communication

'would also involve the sense of touch.'

We want to build technologies that are not just in our world,

-but they are also intimate with our own bodies.

-Yes.

And they're connecting with us at every millimetre, every millisecond.

'Their idea is to record someone's movements,

'then allow a second person to feel them, via the medium of a jacket,

'as a kind of second skin.'

And as you say, the implications for gaming

and a narrative world in which you can participate.

Absolutely. Imagine if you can download your data

for your grandson, who, 20, 30, 40 years from now

can actually live through a day of your life.

-Oh, my God.

-So you can connect people through space and time,

and cultures and ages.

Stories are what make us human,

and we need to create new containers to tell the stories.

It's what really drives me.

Exactly. And I suppose it's about it all being human-shaped,

not technology-shaped.

-The technology shapes itself to the human.

-Yes.

Not the human to the technology. And talking of shaping,

Ken is very slim and properly built and I'm a great...

-But is it possible to try this on?

-We can try it on.

Shall I have a go? I'd love just to get a feel.

-Let's get this here.

-Yeah. It's sort of on, isn't it?

-Yeah, exactly.

So, in your hands, if you move your hands...

-Oh, yes!

-..You will feel as if I'm pushing you.

-Yes.

And it's not like I'm holding you and moving you, it's more subtle.

Yeah. Almost like a magnet in a magnetic field,

-that slight feeling of...

-Exactly.

'All these technologies are ways of recording and transmitting

'feelings, ideas and stories.

'You could say that they're writing, but not as we know it.

'They're the next generation of communication

'for a world that is transcending the written word.'

Even if reading and writing were to disappear tomorrow,

I would argue that the changes they have made to us,

technological, cultural, intellectual,

and in terms of the adaptation of memory

and the transmission of history, they would remain.

We may have invented reading and writing,

but reading and writing have re-invented us.

But one thing that has never changed is our eternal love of storytelling.

And that predates even reading and writing.

And that's what I'm going to be looking at next time.

'I'm going to introduce you to some of my favourite writers.'

He has invented our language. He's so ultra-modern!

To be or not to be?

That is the question.

"True wit is nature to advantage dressed.

"What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."

A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

You go through life and realise people are only hearing

a bit of what you say, because it's the bit that suits them.

HISSES

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