Understanding words appeared, and the dawn of human civilization appeared

Because: the appearance of words has changed the form of information dissemination for hundreds of thousands of years, which has made the original news undergo a qualitative change and marked the real emergence of human civilization.

The following is a detailed explanation.

To some extent, communication depends on the effect of language and symbols. The birth of character symbols and picture symbols, the predecessors of characters, opened the history of the spread of human characters. "It has changed the form of information dissemination for hundreds of thousands of years, made the original news undergo a qualitative change, and marked the real emergence of human civilization." Symbol is the carrier of information and the element of human communication, and information is transmitted through symbols. Different symbols have different characteristics. Among the three symbols, words are the easiest to be preserved, while images and sounds are fleeting. The spread of words is not limited by time and space, and the spread of images and sounds is time-sensitive and one-dimensional.

First, immortal writing service.

The generation and application of characters get rid of the time and space limitations of sound symbols, and with characters, they can spread in different places. In other words, language can spread in different places through the load of words and certain media. Stay at another time. Characters themselves have irreplaceable functions of sound and image symbols. It is easier to understand, explain and save than other symbols.

In ancient times, writing was the most important tool to convey enlightenment. Almost all the people who are saved have nothing to save. If words are removed from the media, real communication probably won't exist. From the Shang Dynasty to today, everyone is a user of words. And communication is mostly inseparable from words. This shows the importance of ghostwriting service. From the industrial age to the information age, the function and value of characters are increasing day by day. Communication is just a tool, and its content basically has to be conveyed by words. Today's electronic superhighway, Internet and multimedia super corridor have created a paperless society. Although people can work without words, their use of words has not decreased, but increased, which makes the function of words play a greater role. The information transmitted by words can be transmitted to a wider place in a shorter time. For example, the use of words in the network. The best example is the spread of ancient books and so on. The first dictionary in ancient China, Shuo Wen Jie Zi, used words to say classics and used classics to explain words. It carries ancient cultural information, like a group of dancing cultural elves, which makes people feel shocked.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions is an archive of Shang Dynasty, but it is also an ancient book at that time, because it can record knowledge, spread information and provide reference. Oracle Bone Inscriptions's records are extremely rich, including not only politics, economy, military affairs, culture, but also astronomy, calendar, medicine and other science and technology. It is called the earliest "archive library" in ancient China. The contents recorded by Oracle Bone Inscriptions are extremely rich, including not only politics, economy, military affairs and culture, but also astronomy, calendar, medicine and other science and technology. Known as the earliest "archives" in ancient China. What is the content of Oracle Bone Inscriptions? Although it has been more than 3,000 years since Oracle Bone Inscriptions, it is a relatively stereotyped, skilled and mature writing. In addition to good or ill luck, sacrifice, conquest, hunting and the rise and fall of a year, the contents of his words also include weather, travel, childbirth, children, disease and so on. Most of Oracle Bone Inscriptions's contents are the records of divination by the royal family in Shang Dynasty. Shang people were superstitious about ghosts and gods, and they had to ask questions about big and small issues. Some divination is about sunny and rainy days, some about agricultural harvest, some about diseases and seeking children, hunting, fighting, sacrifice and other big things to ask! Therefore, Oracle Bone Inscriptions's content can provide a glimpse of people's life and the historical development of Shang Dynasty.

For example, the inscription on Zai Feng's bone records that Zai Feng was rewarded by the Shang kings during the First or Di Feng Period.

For example, Oracle Bone Inscriptions was only a divination in ancient times, but from the window of divination, from sacrifice and conquest to toothache and tinnitus, we can observe:

Astronomically, there is the earliest solar eclipse record in Oracle Bone Inscriptions;

On farming, there are all kinds of crop information in Oracle Bone Inscriptions;

Regarding hunting, there were images of various wild animals in the Central Plains at that time in Oracle Bone Inscriptions.

In the social history, there were complicated status appellations in Oracle Bone Inscriptions of Yin and Shang Dynasties.

As for the historical content of written records, let alone its historical value. Oracle Bone Inscriptions's content provides us with valuable information about the history of the Yin Dynasty. For example, Wang Guowei's Textual Research on Yin Oracle Inscriptions and On the System of Yin and Zhou Dynasties all studied the social politics at that time according to the contents of Oracle Inscriptions. Although Oracle Bone Inscriptions's records were not originally intended to spread knowledge or sum up experience, their historical value has its origin in China's books.

Second, opportunities for writing and communication.

As a visual symbol system, the structure of characters is mainly based on space. Characters are used to store and transmit information. Judging from the development process of human history, different forms of characters have different ways of information expression and interpretation. In the process of sorting out historical materials, the influence of words on communication is obvious.

Writing is the record of language, the written symbol of language and the visual form of language. Characters have played a revolutionary role in preserving and spreading human culture. A large number of cultural achievements and cultural history are recorded in ancient books in the form of words. Words are the guide for people to enter the cultural world. People read cultural achievements through words and create new cultural milestones. Words make communication break through the barriers of time and place.

Writing is another existing form of language, which has changed from human auditory symbols to visual symbols, transformed invisible language with sound into words with both sound and form, and made the spread content exist permanently in an independent way. The spread of written media makes human cultural memory transcend the simple genetic way, the immediacy and presence of verbal communication, that is, the erratic oral way. Characters are the symbols for recording and conveying languages, and the symbol system for recording spoken languages. They are written expressions of spoken language, cultural tools to expand the communicative function of language in time and space, and have played a great role in promoting human civilization. The first medium of human communication is body language and spoken language, in other words, resorting to vision and hearing. As spoken language, all human languages are transmitted through sound, which is no different. However, as a person who has overcome the limitation of spoken English in time and space, his influence alone is in fact extremely far-reaching. The invention of characters is the premise of the spread of characters, and the appearance of characters is the symbol of human beings entering civilized society.

As a communication animal, we have been in contact with or moved by communication in our life. We use it as a personal radar, not only to observe new things, but also to seek assurance and guidance about our relationship with the surrounding society, and at the same time to prove our identity and our understanding of the relationship to others. We use communication as our management tool to make decisions, persuade and manipulate others. Join the larger decision-making plan of society in our small-scale way, and then accept, interpret and respond to signals, which tell us what decisions the society has made and what expectations it has for us. We pay special attention to imparting knowledge, skills and norms to the new members of our society, the new "barbarian" class. They enter this world every year, so it is necessary for them to adapt to the needs of society, become useful members of social groups in about 20 years, get along with them comfortably and safely, and prepare for them to take over the responsibilities that will be entrusted to them.

Contrary to the use of these tools in communication, we conducted a large part of communication in the spirit of seeking happiness and escaping social control. This spirit, as Stephenson pointed out, is the form of game. It is true that we may regard a relatively small part of our communication behavior as "work", and it is impossible to describe the common function that we owe to communication in words. We seek a lot of entertainment in the mass media, even among our most serious public speakers, even in our most serious newspapers or news broadcasts, we attach importance to relaxed style.

Third, the era of efficient communication.

With the development and diversification of media, we can use unprecedented multimedia methods to spread information today. With the development of society and the progress of science and technology, electronic media such as radio and television have appeared, and the channels of hearing and vision have merged again. Nowadays, network communication has opened up a new era in the history of communication with its characteristics of timeliness, interactivity, multimedia and personalization. Language can convey information without body. Words can further separate the voice from the speaker and spread farther and longer; Today, we can use all kinds of efficient media to provide information to a large number of people at all levels, in all directions and around the clock.

Communication is the flow of human meaning. The so-called meaning, according to Marx's point of view, is essentially a reflection of the objective material world. The objective material world includes nature, society and human thinking. When human beings want to convey this understanding of the objective material world (including perceptual knowledge such as feeling, perception and representation and rational knowledge such as concept, judgment and reasoning), communication behavior occurs. Communication needs symbols as an intermediary, and in order to complete the communication behavior well, the status of this intermediary is very important. The first requirement here is that it can express itself most conveniently, quickly and maximally.

The communication activities of human beings are not static, but are constantly evolving with the history of human civilization. In the long primitive society before language came into being, primitive people communicated simple and limited information through actions, expressions and shouts. The division of labor and cooperation in labor have created the need for further communication, and language has gradually emerged. Language highly abstracts thousands of things in nature, and the information that people can exchange is greatly increased. Language transmission must be face to face. The mode of communication is diversified and multi-channel. Auditory symbols and visual symbols are used together. With the invention of writing and papermaking, the spread of information has crossed the barriers of time and space. The appearance of printing makes it easy to copy information and greatly expands the ability of human beings to share information. After the invention of writing, audio-visual communication channels began to separate, and the dissemination of social information was mainly visual. From a historical point of view, the spread of characters makes human information spread beyond the limitation of time and space in essence, and breeds the standardization and popularization of communication. However, the private nature of the written media and the difficulty of reproduction make it impossible to become an efficient media, and it is inevitable that it will be eliminated by history. In the traditional sense, relying on the written media has basically ended its mission, but the writing style itself is still and will always be inseparable from communication.

Different media stipulate different people's sensory proportions, forming different people's perceptual proportions. Because any content is just a human sensory activity, the media inherently customizes the structure and mode of content communication because of the adjustment of its physical attributes to the proportion of human perception. As far as human communication media are concerned, it actually includes two levels: the first level is the most basic communication symbol, that is, the spoken language and body language mentioned above; The second level is the carrier of these basic communication symbols, that is, the tools to transmit and transport these communication symbols in time and space, including words, newspapers, radio, television and the Internet. In these media, the position of words is the most important. Because writing is the first time for human beings to cross the barriers of time and space, thus realizing the beginning of long-distance and long-term communication. If the media is indeed an extension of human beings, then words are the first extension of human beings. Because every extension in the future is nothing more than taking the previous extension as its own content, these future extensions are the amplification of the first extension, and the nature of this amplification has long been stipulated by the first extension.