HOMO-LECTOREM AND HOMO-SCRIPTOREM

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Symbolic language has always coexisted with human beings since their first steps on earth. His need to communicate led him to create different languages. Undoubtedly, oral language, linguistic language, was the first language used to satisfy this intrinsic need. Art, mathematics, religion, are other languages that were incorporated into his development in all its physical, intellectual and spiritual aspects.

Each of them contains different levels of abstraction and also fulfill different purposes.

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The oral language developed in an ingenious way to the human being, on a par with others such as plastic art, whose manifestations and cave testimonies have been found developed since the Paleolithic era -development of several hominids-. Nevertheless, this great need for communication placed Homo Sapiens in a position that led him to develop writing after many millennia, in order to satisfy it.

Approximately 5,000 years ago, human beings began to expand their verbal language, creating symbols to represent oral sounds, spoken gutturally, associating signs and characters for each of the words, giving rise to written language by means of codes and writing spelling, in different regions of the planet.

It must be understood that writing has always been associated with reading, so they were born together and developed hand in hand.

The plastic, pictorial, relief, sculptural, etc., language was too abstract for certain tasks that human beings needed to express themselves and communicate in other manifestations of social-commercial type and with greater precision. It was necessary for these other spheres of communication to be met with another language: written language; a language with other symbolic specifications that would allow it to satisfy those other demands of communication, and not be exposed to confusions and communicative or expressive inaccuracies.

With these requirements, writing and reading were born, assimilating more concrete and precise specifications, which could allow a more concise and methodical communication, with a translation by means of special, concrete and differentiated signs.

It is known that the human being has an inner plastic artist, which allows him to communicate some emotions and feelings that he has loaded in his interiority; a language that cannot be substituted, although some experts comment that it can be replaced with the sum of 2 or 3 of other languages. Its conformation contains springs that can hardly be found in other symbolic languages. This inner being is born with Homo Sapiens and its manifestations almost immediately after its appearance on earth; to keep this being awake and acting is to help sustain and nourish it with strength and life.

Now, just as physical Nature has directly participated in our change from nomadic to sedentary, Homo Sapiens has also contributed to it, since it has been creating those artificial, extraordinary and effective “crutches”, both technological, economic and of human development, so that we avoid putting our feet on the ground. We have already shown in Post HOMO-ITER: MAN-WALKER. PART I and in Post ..HOMO-ITER: MAN-WALKER. PART II, how in the course of 1.5 million years Homo Sapiens became a being that practically does not walk anymore; I do not doubt that he himself will also manage to “discourage” his process of reading and writing; recent activities, as we have already noted, since they were forged only 5,000 years ago.

We expressed in Part I, of the posts mentioned above, how the human being has been abandoning the practice of walking throughout the last 10,000 years, having been, since the most remote times, a perfect walker in his erectus and nomadic characteristic.

He will surely create other “crutches” to stop reading and writing. One way to avoid reading is to create “chips” or complex integrated circuits, and place them in the human brain, which would store all the knowledge that Humanity has created up to the historical moment that this graft is given. On the other hand, the activity of writing could be developed by certain special robots built with powerful computers that would allow them to increase and perfect this human communicative and artistic creation. Both technological forms are close to being developed, they are just around the corner.

An example that we are currently experiencing, and that will prevent both activities of reading and writing, is the learning of other languages; in addition, this will prevent another fundamental aspect in the mental development that is achieved with the learning of another language in addition to the mother tongue, which we can call linguistic extension, related to the philological conceptualization (etymological and grammatical) that achieves a mental intensification of the brain. These devices are digital language translators.

Graphically we could venture to predict globally this futuristic process, as suggested below, that we would pass from phase A) Historical situation, to phase B) Probable future situation:

A) HISTORICAL SITUATION

B) PROBABLE FUTURE SITUATION

NOTE: For construction and clarity of the graph, the horizontal axis is disproportionate. The line below shows the points of the graph at the correct scale.

Is stopping walking an evolution or a regression?

It is very likely that some of the diseases that are affecting us, is because we have replaced walking, by using devices of transportation, for having stopped walking. The man of the future will perhaps be the HOMO-ITER, the one who will be more aware that he must now replace some equipment of transportation (Post THE ANCIENT MAYAS AND THEIR WHITE ROADS. PART I), to go back to walking, and other activities that he carries out standing he must start walking, and others that he carries out sitting, he must develop them standing and/or walking. (Post HOMO-ITER: MAN-WALKER. PART I and Post HOMO-ITER: MAN-WALKER. PART II).

Is stopping reading and writing an evolution or a regression?

In several posts I have already mentioned the great benefits we get from reading and writing, when we walk. It would be inopportune to repeat them again, however, we can add that we have already achieved the sedentary lifestyle of walking, but reaching the “sedentary lifestyle of reading and writing” would be one more step we would take to provoke a backward step in the human being, and it will surely generate in his physical and mental development, an absolute degeneration and difficult to escape from it.

I would like to emphasize the following: We read and store; we write and download information processed from our interiority. When we read and write, whether notes or texts, while we walk, our mind receives information through the senses and that information is not received in a passive way, but it processes -analyzes-, composes -makes up, shades- and recomposes -decomposes, accommodates, organizes, corrects, modifies, reforms, integrates-, in such a way that the external stimuli are transformed into images that each of us performs in a very particular and unrepeatable way. It moves our whole brain and mind, generating an appreciable number of messages to all the organs, systems and glands of the organism. A true Fountain of Youth. (Post THE WALK-RWD SYSTEM ENCOURAGES CREATIVE THINKING).

It would be very profitable to list, speculate and imagine the different and possible technological-digital innovations that in the very near future will prevent us from reading and writing. As I said, they are just around the corner, or are already in our midst acting unfortunately against these powerful processes of human mental development, as we have pointed out when using digital language translators. We could also imagine digital systems implanted in the human brain functioning as creative draftsmen or plastic artists, not to say painters, sculptors and graphic designers.

Now, I have been able to present a possible scenario by considering that in the future we could solve part of the repercussion that sedentarism has generated in the human being, by foreseeing that a new being could emerge, the HOMO-ITER, who would be a striving individual -man and woman- who has become aware that walking is the QUASI-FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH.

The stage that I am now describing could be limited and even disappear, if we become aware of what awaits us if we continue along this path of accelerated “technologism”, without analyzing the negative effects that it can cause in the human being.

In 2005 the short story “Apocalipsis Literas” was awarded in the Short Story Contest, which I would like to quote some of its parts that I consider outstanding, as a premonition of what may happen in the future. The author of this story, Edel C. Pinera, foresees a “linguaecide”, and expresses: “It seems that just as the minstrels, bards, scribes and amanuenses, lithographs and printing presses disappeared in the past, so did word processors, readers and writers. Apparently, the era of the users of the written word, and with it, of verbal communication, had come to an end. …] The written word was ostracized, especially after the promulgation of the “2nd Law 3.1416” concerning the worldwide prohibition of writings and writers on any subject that was not one hundred percent scientific-technological. This 2nd Prohibition Law ‘added severe punishments, including the death penalty for repeat offenders’, for any party detected making use of them in their conventional or literary form – oral and written – by uttering, dictating, writing, reading or hearing them. Any word joined to other word(s) that did not refer to some numerical, mathematical, accounting, financial or cybernetic content, would be considered as subversive. […] The invasion of digitized viruses attacking any type of text that was not mathematical, written on the net and by any other electronic means, ended up making any attempt to rescue language succumb; verses and prose bled together in symbiotic agonistic mutilation (agonist). […] The step to such levels of linguistic suppression was simple, considering that 70 percent of the world’s population was already illiterate since the beginning of the 21st century and that in those times it was suggested to the complaining population better “not to read” in order not to learn about the problems of the societies of that time.”

So, before we begin to be illiterate beings per se, by the analog-digital way, let us look for ways to become from this moment on Homo-Lectorem and Homo-Escriptorem and that with this conversion we can advance towards the future without decadence or degeneration by avoiding our brain activities that have served and may continue to serve as engines of food and energetic and nutritional propulsion, besides being the main sources to place us in this stage of unimaginable development.

We can further consider that we deserve to try to consciously “create” people with 2 or more functions in one and the same: Walker-Reader, Walker-Writer, or even Walker-Reader-Writer.

Is stopping drawing an evolution or a regression?

To defeat the plastic artist we have inside us is to act against nature.

Let us not doubt that we must participate in the creation of those types of creative and healthy human beings, through reading, writing and drawing, while we walk every day.

Also, I must not fail to mention that, although the human being has congenital an inner plastic artist, the time could come when that human nature of plastic creator atrophies, if we do not take actions in that sense to foster, nurture and self-reproduce those different HOMO that we have developed up to these moments.

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