Conclusion: The Last Canary?

Written documentation provides a stable object that can be analyzed and interpreted long after the ephemeral features of speech and gesture have vanished in real-time communication. Myers (1990) argues that written texts provide an important site for research because texts “hold still” and provide “portable” objects that are amenable to analysis. ¹ Olson (1994) suggests that one of the “virtues of print” is that it allows researchers to examine how societies change as they come to depend more and more on writing. ² But print culture has not entirely replaced oral culture; nor can print alone provide an adequate modality for representing the dynamic uncertainty of the material world. “What writing represents” and “what it does not” depend upon conceptions of literacy, epistemological notions of how we come to know the world, systems of record keeping that preserve some literate practices and not others, and systems of interpretation that enable us to understand and make sense of “what writing means” in a culture. ³