Barry Sanders, Ivan Illich - 1989 - ABC - The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (186p).pdf

"What Illich and Sanders have done...is to trace the advent and spread of the written word...and analyze the effects the switch from an oral to a written tradition has had on both the inner life of the individual and the collective life of the society."--JoAnne Gutin, The Voice (Berkeley, California)

The authors argue that the relation that has bound speaker to speech and made discourse whole and meaningful disintegrated with the invention of the alphabet, leaving streams of separate words detached from any context of utterance. After the alphabet, some unity was maintained by style and grammar, and by ties between vernacular languages and the communities using them; but this unity is threatened by information processing that strips the texts into their component bits. Librarians and everyone else concerned with the fate of books should read this one. (From Library Journal).