Speech vs. Writing

The arts of speech and writing are the two essential forms of communication vital towards ensuring stability in society. Through these communication forms we grasp everything from information to entertainment, education to leisure, all of which we need to function through life and love it. To choose which one is more important in today’s society is difficult to understand seeing how the two coincide and reflect one another so fittingly. But when it comes down to it, it is definitely writing which takes precedence over speech in terms of importance to today’s society.
Speech has been carried out throughout history as the most fundamental manner in communication, the base for which all other communications can exist. It is the only form of primary orality ever to or that ever will exist, simply for the fact that there is nothing else on it’s plane. It is in it’s own right unique because of the way it functions and the way it influences. The incorporation of sound with speech attributes to this uniqueness. And from that sound, speech becomes universal. We all essentially hear the same sounds, more or less, and so we all attain the same knowledge being emitted from the speech. The only thing different is how we choose to interpret that knowledge. Speech is indiscriminate to any and all, the only difference is how we choose to cause that speech to influence. It is the fundamental manner of communicating, universal in every sense, the base for humans to communicate in our society. But since it’s origins we have long evolved from that basic form and have, since, extended our communications reach far beyond that anticipated. Which is why writing has now taken precedence over speech in our society.
Although a secondary orality, writing has become the superior form of communication in today’s imperfect world. Where speech lay the foundation for communication, writing carried it to higher echelons. From literature to the internet, writing is literally in every façade of today’s society, and without it communicating would still consist only of speech. Innovations in technology, such as the invention of the printing press and our present-day internet, would not function at all without writing. Everything would be oral and, while that isn’t all negative, it is detrimental in a lot of ways. Writing allows for communication to be available in virtually any location. Although the invention of the radio made it so that speech could be heard over larger distances, writing and its implementation through the internet and other means gives it a sense of concrete concision that can be accessed anywhere at any given moment, something speech has always lacked seeing as how speech and it’s relationship to sound makes it so that it dies just as it comes into existence. Both forms foster a “communal sense”, making each universal in their own regard. But the universality derived from writing, again, gives us that concrete record, something we can go back to over and over again, now more effectively than ever because of the internet. And what writing offers that speech cannot do is impose literacy on a society now seemingly deteriorating in that sector. While there will be many who will argue that technology is dragging down literacy and our standards of intellectualism, there is no denial that writing has mad literacy more possible in today’s society more so than in any other society. Now we have literature, we have film (which depends on writing to make it work), we have music, and we have the internet, all of which depend extensively on writing. Our society is now structured in a way which literacy needs to flourish or, at the very least, needs to remain relevant, Speech can get you so far. And where it can’t writing compounds the effectiveness of speech in forms that can be translated and, thus understood in ways that, perhaps, speech could not achieve.
Writing is essential above any other form of communication in today’s society. It’s vital to the spread of literacy in our society. The question is whether or not we allow our society to become more literate, whether or not we choose to use the tools placed before us to lift our intellectual beings beyond what we are now. In today’s society, we do not realize just how great we have it in terms of all of the knowledge and ways of attaining it we now possess. While writing is important in today’s society, it does have it’s flaws, but only because we develop these flaws, only because we allow ourselves to become more introverted or because we allow our communication to be more impersonal. As with every new technology, we have to ensure that we do not become too dependent nor become too ignorant of what they have to offer. We have to find the grey area in between, so that we may reap the benefits of writing and other technologies, while not succumbing to the dangers of technological advancement.