## 2 Information as a Variable in Media Ecology Analysis
### Orality and Literacy  
Along with the distinction between word and image, and more generally the digital and the analogical, within the field of media ecology great emphasis is placed on the distinction between oality and literacy, that is, the difference between speech and writing as linguistic codes. Rather than the spoken word and the written word being two parallel symbol systems, however, writing is defined as a secondary symbol system [22], used to encode the primary symbol system of speech. As previously noted, the content of writing is speech, and this form of remediation represents the digitization of one digital code by another. The result is that the written word is a more abstract symbolic form that the spoken word, one that involves a process of decontextualization, as language is removed from the context of co-present communicators, and also from the rich accompaniment of nonverbal communication that also acts as a form of metacommunication (as tone of voice facial expression, gesture, posture, _etc._, all are cues that can help the receiver to interpret the information associated with the verbal message). In addition to decontextualization, the encoding of spoken language into written form involves a translation from one sensory mode to another, from hearing to vision. This is a qualitative shift, with a variety of implications, as previously noted, including much improved fidelity in messages transmitted over space, the ability to evaluate messages more effectively by allowing for their review and objective analysis, an enhanced ability to formulate messages given the potential for editing and rewriting, and the enormous expansion of our capacity for information storage. All of this contributes to a great increase in the volume of information in societies with writing, especially as writing systems becomes more efficient through the development of phonetic writing, and in particular the alphabet. Again, as previously noted, this sets the stage for the information explosion resulting from the printing revolution that began in mid-15 th century Europe, and that has been further extended by the many innovations in communication technology of the past two centuries. While our present era is often referred to as _the information age_, [PERSON] and [PERSON] argue that it is simply the most recent in a series of _information ages_ that begins circa 3500 BCE in Mesopotamia:  
The invention of writing actually gave birth to information itself, engendering the first information revolution. Writing created new entities, mental objects that exist apart from the flow of speech, along with the earliest, systematic attempts to organize this abstract mental world.... [54]  
Writing, as a code that encodes a code, extends the digital quality of language, but what [PERSON] and [PERSON] stress is writing's decontexualization of the word, as it removes language from the context of a specific time and place, while providing discourse with a degree of permanence previously inconceivable. In doing so, writing also gives us the ability to take words out of their natural context of human dialogue and oral performance alike, for example, as [PERSON] notes, in the very basic activity of making lists, one of the first uses of the written word [46]. In a list, we can have subjects without predicates, for instance, 12 chickens, 7 cows, 20 bushels of wheat, but in conversation, such utterances would make no sense, prompting the listener to respond, \"What about them? What are you trying to say?\" Writing even establishes the concept of words as separate things, each word represented by its own character or group of characters, whereas in speech words can be strung together without pause as a single vocalization or utterance. As [PERSON] and [PERSON] explain:  
Information came into being at the cusp between orality and literacy, a singular moment that cannot itself be understood unless we first consider the nature of the oral culture that literacy would transform.