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in the virtual hands of anyone in the world who wants to read it. That would be a boon not only for your novel but for myriad other texts as well. And in the process, who knows? We may succeed in engaging a suitably diverse and representative readership, something geometrically beyond John Milton’s elitist notion of a “fit audience though few.” We may even manage to recover the root meaning of “to publish”—which is emphatically not “to sequester,” but rather “to make [truly] public.” L Homo Sapiens’ Calendar Year Sometimes it seems as though writing has been with us forever in one form or another. Pre-Gutenberg media such as the rich manuscript traditions of the ancient and medieval worlds, not to mention even earlier inscribed tablets from the Middle East, are commonly thought to offer evidence of writing systems coeval with the development of civilization as we know it. But perhaps that’s the point—just how do we “know it”? Our default notion of history is founded on documentation, that is, on textualized knowledge. And what precedes documentable reality? Although archeology can extend our knowledge further—albeit by resorting to interpreting objects (Illusion of Object)—its reach is necessarily limited. The pejorative label “Dark Ages,” for example, regularly denotes pretextual eras, conventionally understood as periods when writing was unavailable to light the way. Commitment to a textual definition of origins has blinded us to the technology of oral tradition that long predated writing and texts of any sort and which served as the principal communications medium through which predocumentary societies were built and maintained. By insisting on history as text-derived, we’ve artificially defined whatever preceded writing out of existence. We have foreshortened our species’ history. Given our unthinking faith in the ideology of the text (Ideology of the Text), we may be surprised to learn that writing is in fact a very recent invention. It most certainly wasn’t there at the beginning, or even near the beginning for that matter. Just how much of the life span of Homo sapiens is implicated by this media chauvinism? What part of our history as a species is lost to the (indefensible ) assertion that communication and culture-building begin only when the tAgora is founded? Our species-year As Carl Sagan often remarked when discussing the age of the universe, huge numbers can be very hard to grasp and therefore deceiving. The enormity of astronomical time and space is intrinsically difficult for most of us to imagine , and only made more difficult by the scale of measurement; a million or Homo Sapiens’ Calendar Year . 113 twenty million or a billion are figures that don’t get much play in our everyday experience. What’s true of the story of the universe is to some degree true of the tale of media-invention. Taking a cue from Sagan, then, let’s consider the advent of writing and related events on a calendrical rather than an absolute numerical scale.52 Let’s think of Homo sapiens’ entire history as a total of twelve speciesmonths spread over a single species-year, and then plot the various media-events on this more manageable grid. We start with two preliminaries about the calculations that appear in the following table. First, they’re based on a very conservative estimate of the longevity of Homo sapiens: one hundred thousand years. Many sources cite a much longer period of time. Second, the dates assigned to the media-inventions are taken largely from a major source entitled The World’s Writing Systems; the most modern events, such as the emergence of the Internet, are plotted on the basis of commonly agreed-upon dates.53 Lengthening our species’ life span would make this demonstration more dramatic (moving all of the charted events later in the calendar year), while absolute date-shifts of even an entire millennium would move the invention only three to four species-days one way or the other. In other words, the table presents a conservative and reliable if rough chronological perspective on the origins of various landmark media. The first real writing developed by humankind appears more than 11/12—or about 95 percent—of the way through our species-year. Another way to put it is that the tAgora has been open for communicative business for only twenty-one species-days, merely 5 percent of the time we’ve been creating and maintaining societies. Of course, the Internet and the eAgora...

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