The Tyranny Of Written Knowledge

🍏your Sunday read 4th May, 2025

A well-researched original piece to get you thinking.

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Hi Scholar,

This Sunday’s essay, titled The Tyranny of Written Knowledge, might not be an easy one to digest. The argument we make - about the pulverising effects that knowledge communicated through written media has had on both knowledge itself and our relationship to it - might not sit well with you at first. We appreciate that. Especially given that we are making this argument through writing - yes, we are well aware of the irony. As writers ourselves, it has been hard for us to come to terms with too: we value writing deeply.

But in our reading, thinking, and most importantly, in talking to each other, we came to a critique of writing that helped us recognise just how deeply the primacy of the written form has shaped our knowledge-making activities. Drawing on Harold Innis’ theory of the material biases of communication media, we’ve sought to show how writing’s dominance - particularly in its modern, industrialised form - has reshaped what counts as knowledge, and how it circulates. And in classic Scholarly Letter fashion, this is not a critique that destroys or subtracts. It is one that adds. Drawing on African philosophy, we offer a counter-weight - a balancing force - to the tyranny of written knowledge.

The Tyranny of Written Knowledge

Written by The Critic and The Tatler

Allow us to start with a short story about a fictional character who is learning the ropes of the research laboratory: The Tatler. 

Arriving at the building which houses the lab, The Tatler is greeted by Postdoc, an individual not much older than himself, who invites him into the laboratory.

Once inside, The Tatler finds himself in a room filled with the equipment necessary to fulfill the laboratory’s purpose of producing knowledge. Immediately to his left is a rack where several white lab coats are hanging on hooks. Small machines (ranging from the size of a microwave to a calculator) and bottles of various chemicals populate the workspace throughout the lab. Larger equipment lines the walls: fridges and freezers; a box-like structure made of stainless steel and glass; large gas cylinders.

Expecting Postdoc to begin the induction with a demonstration of how to use the machines and equipment, or at the very least an explanation about their nature, The Tatler is instead led through the lab into a neighbouring room. This room is smaller, more of an office - computers, printers, books and swivel chairs. Postdoc opens a cabinet and hands him a notebook, a ballpoint pen, and a marker pen.

“The Tatler, when I started my lab training my supervisor gave me some advice which I will now share with you: write everything that you do down in your notebook.”

It was sage advice, for there was much to record and the pages filled up rapidly. To-do lists and protocols were followed by detailed descriptions of experimental procedures - concentrations of chemicals, incubation times, temperatures - which were followed by personal observations, comments and questions. 

Despite Postdoc not providing instructions for what to do with the marker pen, its function soon became apparent. In the course of his laboratory work, The Tatler was forever writing names of chemicals, dates and concentrations on tubes, flasks and beakers. These marker pens were so important to day-to-day work that they often went “missing”. Though he would never admit it to his fellow lab mates, The Tatler may have swiped a pen or two from an unsupervised lab coat pocket when his own had mysteriously vanished.  

The most important tools or pieces of equipment The Tatler would ever use during the 2 years they spent in academic research laboratories were pens and notebooks. 

Tell us, dear Scholar, does that surprise you? Did you expect that in a room full of expensive and complicated equipment our protagonist’s most important tools would be a cheap notebook and something to write with? 

 What The Tatler was experiencing as a research scientist in-training in 2020 had been noticed by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar in the 1970’s - that the act of literary inscription forms a large part of the work done in research labs:

Not many scientists would like the idea of the work they do represented as a literary activity. And yet, it's hard to deny that a considerable bulk of activity performed in a laboratory does indeed centre around various written/inscription-based documents and files: either originating within the laboratory itself or published literature from the outside. In other areas of research that do not require laboratories or apparatus however, like the social sciences or humanities, the foundational and industrious role that writing, inscription and documentation takes in producing knowledge is more familiar to us. 

Whatever the field of study, writing is the workshop where the raw materials of inquiry are crafted into the durable artifacts of scholarship. To put it simply, writing takes on an essential role in our abilities to produce knowledge. 

Will you, dear Scholar, indulge us for a few moments longer? We promise that the rest of this essay is far more lively than a lecture on ‘why writing matters.’ You do not need that explained to you; we know you already know. And yet, you - as a fellow Scholar - will also know that in building any argument properly, one must often lay down the obvious, the tedious, the already-known. Bear with us, then, as we set down the boring but necessary foundations before we can move to more interesting ground.

Writing is knowledge

Writing serves as a supreme, critical technology for research. One could even say that writing is knowledge. The reasons why this is so are probably obvious.

Firstly, writing has from the very beginning acted as a gatekeeping mechanism, controlling who may contribute to knowledge. Before literacy became widespread, the ability to write was itself a marker of being highly educated. More specifically, it was the highly educated man who knew how to write, and therefore was permitted to contribute to knowledge. In seventeenth-century England, for example, women were often taught only to read, not to write - automatically excluding them from formal participation in the production of knowledge. Even today, despite widespread literacy, writing for academic purposes requires proficiency in a particular style of writing - a style that we recognize as capable of “producing” knowledge.

Beyond controlling who may produce knowledge, writing also acts as a technique for producing it. Writing makes thought visible and therefore ultimately makes conceptualization possible. Building on this idea is the argument that writing and inscription "translate concepts and observations into two-dimensional, manageable, reproducible objects." Beyond merely managing thought, writing becomes a tool for abstraction and manipulation.

Finally - and perhaps most obviously - writing provides durability to knowledge. Only when written down does knowledge solidify, take shape, become tangible. Additionally, it is only when knowledge is inscribed - for instance, in the form of a journal article - that it counts as knowledge. Writing not only acts as a filter for who may contribute; it provides the foundation for what is allowed to be counted as knowledge at all.

We might stop to ask, however, whether the primacy of written communication in research has truly been neutral.

Has the superiority with which writing has established itself in our knowledge-making practices had no effect at all on knowledge itself? Or for that matter, on our relationship to it? 

Space, time, and writing media

To answer this question, we turn to, what could be regarded as, the founding text of media studies: Harold Adams Innis’ essay ‘A Plea for Time’. In it, Innis develops an understanding of how communication systems - the mediums through which people communicate - shape societies. Through a historical analysis of various societies and their dominant media forms, Innis shows that media, far from simply being channels for information, are instruments of influence and power. 

What Innis saw was that the material forms of different media carry different biases: some are biased toward time, others toward space.

Put simply, all communication systems are transportation systems: every medium carries information from one place to another. 

However, some media are better at carrying information through time and others across space. 

Time-biased media, for instance, are durable but not easily transportable. Think clay tablets used during the Sumerian civilization: they could endure across centuries but were limited in spreading across regions. 

Space-biased media, on the other hand, are lightweight and highly distributable, but less enduring. A newspaper can circulate widely in the morning and end up discarded by evening. 

Because societies organize and sustain themselves through acts of communication, the material biases of their dominant media inevitably shape their longevity, character, and size - depending on how long their messages last, and/or how far they can travel.

On the matter of writing in itself, it is easy enough to recognise that it is time biased: it enables thoughts and ideas to persist beyond the lives of the people who produced them. 

Innovations in writing media, on the other hand, have largely aimed at expanding the reach of written communication. 

Clay tablets were succeeded by papyrus scrolls and parchment codices, which in turn were succeeded by lightweight paper documents. The mechanization of writing, brought forward by the invention of the printing press, was especially significant in breaking the boundaries of where and how far written communication could travel.

Accordingly, the material forms of writing have increasingly come to privilege traveling distances in space over distances through time. 

Importantly, this increasing emphasis on reach and reproduction did not remain a neutral technological development; it has been deeply entangled with the commercial interests of media ‘empires’. The spreadability of written communication was good for the commercialisation of information. Written communication, mechanized by the printing press, successfully turned information into a commercially viable product that could be sold to people far and wide at scale. 

However, for commercial enterprises in communication to achieve a return on their capital investments, it was not enough for people to consume information globally; they had to consume more information, more often. 

The consumption of more could only realistically be achieved if 'new' information was constantly made available. That is, the destruction of time’s continuity - what Innis described as

"a continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence" and a shift toward present-mindedness, was necessary. 

These shifts in communication media and practices were not isolated technological phenomena; they gradually transformed the ways in which knowledge itself was produced, preserved, and consumed. 

In thinking about writing not just as a tool but as a medium with its own material biases, Innis’ work therefore opens a way for us to reconsider the deeper effects that writing may have had: not only on how knowledge travels, but on how knowledge itself is formed and valued.

Knowledge and it’s destruction of continuity

Returning now to writing and our activities of knowing, we often see - our perspective shaped by the Enlightenment Era - the material history of written communication as one characterized by the spread of knowledge and understanding. The important word being "spread."

The growth of the printing and press industry, which provided the medium for written communication to be produced at scale and distributed across regions, facilitated this expansion. Knowledge in written form came to be widely reproduced and circulated precisely because of the space-bias of mechanized written communication media.

Yet the very same forces that enabled the spread of knowledge also set the conditions for its commercialization and industrialization. 

As written communication media became more space-biased, knowledge itself increasingly became a product to be produced, reproduced, and consumed at scale.

It was as early as the 1920s that the phrase "publish or perish" emerged in academic contexts, reflecting the incentive to produce and disseminate "new" knowledge at an ever-accelerating pace. The industrialization of written communication has gone hand in hand with the industrialization of knowledge itself:

while it has enlarged the spatial expansion of knowledge, it has also contributed to the destruction of knowledge's continuity through a shift toward present-mindedness and novelty. 

The advent of the Internet, and therewith the digitized publication of written communication has only further accelerated this space-bias and present-mindedness. Academic publishing, today, has at its core both the publication of “new” research papers, and the ability of these papers to ‘reach’ - that is, read, consumed, and most importantly, cited - more widely than ever before.

It is no surprise that when you visit journal websites, the first thing you see is often "latest published."

The digital media of written communication, while superior in reach, exacerbates our tendency to treat knowledge as something to be used and discarded - valued more for its circulation than for its meaning.

To a large extent, writing - and especially the evolution of its material media - has not been neutral: it has profoundly shaped not only how we know, but also what we count as knowing. 

In this critique of writing and its media, we may then begin to open the question of possible ways to rebalance it. And so we might ask:

How might we begin to counter the excesses of modern, space-biased, written forms of knowledge - forms that have had a pulverizing effect on the durability and continuity of our knowledge-making activities?

To propose a counter-balance to the effects of written communication’s dominance on knowledge, we need to turn to what has typically been positioned in opposition to it: the spoken word. 

Orality in Opposition 

The relation between the spoken word and knowledge - particularly in the European tradition - remains underdeveloped. African philosophy, by contrast, has not overlooked the spoken word. It is to this way of thinking that we now turn, seeking ways of thinking about speaking and knowing that the European tradition has long neglected. 

Nowhere in time was the tension between the written and the spoken word so visible as during the period leading up to the colonisation of Africa by Europe. Based on the false belief that systems of writing had never developed, Africa was defined by Europeans during the period of colonial dominance as “the continent of orality”. This narrative was, of course, inaccurate for writing had long played a significant role in African scholarship.

African thought (forgive us for using a general term to describe a diverse and heterogeneous body of intellectual traditions) does not recognise a separation between the spoken and the written word. 

Instead, it understands them as deeply connected modes of expression and transmission, each enriching the other.

European colonizers were, perhaps not surprisingly, dismissive of African views of relatedness between the oral and the written. Instead, they sought to impose their existing understanding of what counts as knowledge based on the written word. This dominance entrenched the dichotomy that lives on: the oral opposed to the written, tradition opposed to modernity.

The West defines orality as thought and expression in societies where writing has never been developed. The theory is that following the introduction of writing, a society’s use of orality should reduce in favour of writing. By contrast, in African thought, orality refers to how oral texts are produced, transmitted, and received; these oral texts, or oral literature, are given equal status to written texts. 

Following this, African thought argues that oral tradition, oral literature, and orality are the basis upon which written knowledge is built. To put it simply, the spoken word as a medium for sharing, developing, and preserving knowledge came before the written. 

Orality, therefore, represents “deep thought”, a kind of embodied knowledge that lives on and persists inside the individual members of a society or group. 

One of the most interesting consequences of respecting knowledge held in oral literature and orality is the de-prioritising of the individual. The European tradition ascribes the knowledge contained in written words to whoever wrote them down. This allows ownership over what was written - our current system of citations, publication records, paywalls and copyright are the epitome of this. Knowledge contained in spoken words, however, is rarely linked to any one person nor does it need to be. Instead oral knowledge represents

The spoken word becomes a mechanism, a technique, a facilitator of collaboration.  

Knowledge may be created or generated by individuals, yet through orality the contributions of individual thinkers to oral literature become blended. Knowledge held in orality is, by definition shared, and as a result, common property. And when knowledge is produced and shared orally, it carries with it a collective responsibility for its integrity and preservation. 

Time, Space, and Orality 

To reiterate, knowledge developed and shared through oral dialogue and disputation is embodied, collective, and relational - grounded in a culture of both participation and inheritance. From this perspective, knowledge becomes a cultural force: something lived, experienced, and rehearsed through civilizational memory. 

This way of relating to knowledge - through a kind of living-with that is enabled by its oral nature - facilitates continuity through time. 

Linking this to Innis’s work on the space- and time-biases of communication media, we can therefore understand orality from African perspectives as carrying a pronounced time-bias. Knowledge based on orality may not reach further than the immediate people who create it, but it remains front of mind in the people who sustain it.

Unlike the mass production and dissemination of the written word which is sustained by the media it is written on, and is easily forgotten, oral literature is sustained through continuous acts of cultivation: speaking, hearing, and engaging.

Innis may not have been aware of the oral intellectual traditions of African philosophy during his time, but trained in classical history and philosophy, he held a deep veneration for oral traditions of conversation, debate, and speech. He argued that the flourishing of Greek culture in the 5th century BCE was made possible by a rare harmony between time and space: a balance between oral and written communication. 

The Greeks were engaged in spatial concerns: territorial expansion, the development of a money economy, and geometric abstraction, but these were tempered by strong oral traditions that preserved memory, ritual, and civic participation.

The Symposium and the Agora were exactly the kind of spaces which provide us with evidence of Ancient Greece’s practices of collective dialogue and deliberation, where knowledge was spoken, argued, and lived. Even as writing developed, it did not yet displace the oral forms at the centre of intellectual and public life.

In this way, the classical academe - through its integration of both oral and written practices - maintained a balance between temporal continuity and spatial reach.

But as Innis observed, this balance was fragile. The spread of writing in the latter 5th century BCE, alongside the expansion of empire and the growing demands of administration, gradually displaced the oral traditions that had sustained civic life. Innis remarked that

What began as a productive balance between time and space eventually tilted toward the space-bias of writing and with it, the dissolution of a cultural moment where knowledge was both spoken and shared.

Balancing Knowledge 

In contemporary academia, this loss of balance between time and space has only deepened. The over-reliance on written, digitised communication - especially in the form of academic publishing - has pushed us further away from a durational, meaning-rich relationship to knowledge. 

With the ever-growing emphasis on communicating knowledge through written publications, we are increasingly experiencing a transactional relationship with knowledge: one that prioritises storage, circulation, and standardisation. 

This is the very tyranny of written knowledge in forms that are ever-more concerned with more: more novelty and more spatial reach.  

If we are to prevent the further erosion of continuity, community, and meaningful engagement with knowledge, especially in the face of a growing climate of hyper-productivity, fast research, and knowledge commodification, we must turn to orality. 

Scholar, you know what we are referring to here: the conversations you have with colleagues after a seminar; the conferences where new ideas take shape not in the Q&A, but in the corridor or over lunch. Uncitable though they are, these moments are where research grows.

Some of the fondest memories The Critic holds are of the P(ub)hDs she attended: informal pub gatherings where no one competed, no one performed - people simply talked, shared stories, and joked. 

This is orality: the act of talking and listening, gathered in place, anchored in human intimacy. It offers something that abstracted, depersonalised written communication cannot.

It provides a vehicle for communal, critical, and creative thought - one that reshapes our orientation to knowledge itself.

It re-grounds us, reminds us that knowledge is not a product but a process, not individual property but a shared endeavour.

When knowledge is carried in our bodies and passed between us - in story, in dialogue, in disputation - it endures differently. It is tested, refined, made to live again. This mode of knowing slows us down. It draws us away from speed, fragmentation, and commodification.

Isabelle Stengers, in her book Another Science is Possible, talks about the need for “civilizing science.” By this, she is calling for science to be subjected to obligations beyond those dictated by speed, competition, and market logic, and instead to develop new public obligations rooted in collective responsibility. It is a provocation to make science attentive to its entanglements - ecological, social, and political.

Participants in knowledge-making need, as she puts it, not only to connect with one another, but

An Invitation 

In this light of the tyranny of written knowledge, reviving orality within scholarly life is not a nostalgic return to outdated forms, but a crucial method for achieving a civilized science. Oral traditions - with their emphasis on presence, listening, disputation, and the living transmission of knowledge - cultivate the slow, transformative engagements that Stengers calls for.

They allow knowledge to remain grounded in human intimacy and mutual responsibility, offering a counterweight to the abstraction, commodification, and speed that characterize fast research today.

You see now, Scholar, why we feel the turn to orality in our knowledge-making activities to be so urgent. The power of the written word in knowledge making has for a long time gone largely unchecked. Yet our critique of this tyranny is not intended to subtract from the role writing plays in knowledge making.

Rather, this critique proposes the (re)introduction of orality as a balancing force. 

Please do not mistake our proposition as a plea for return to some preliterate age of pure speech and dialogue. As we’ve already said, following African philosophy, writing and speaking are not opposed, but symbiotic - their relationship is one of mutual interaction. 

Our claim is simple: orality is necessary to counterbalance a growing imbalance in our knowledge ecosystem - one marked by a perverse infatuation not just with reach, but with novelty and productivity in the form of the written publication. This is a call to add to, not subtract from, how we conduct ourselves in our pursuits of knowledge.

And so we invite you, Scholar, to consider - deeply and practically - whether you should not desire to talk, to listen, and to embody your knowledge more fully by connecting with others.

If you have any questions, feedback or comments on The Scholarly Letter, drop a comment or write to us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you!