What would our world look like without writing? From establishing communities to the endless scrolls of texts on our phones, it is easy to overlook that writing has an insurmountable presence in our everyday lives. Media theorist Lydia H. Liu’s chapter, Writing, reminds us that writing is more than a writing tool for recording speech. It is a material technology and symbolic system, tracing its influence from the rise of civilisations to the digital age. In her discussion, Liu poses six central questions: the origins of writing, its role in governance, the relationship between scripts and systems, its evolution across different media, writing as a visual representation of speech, and its place in the digital age, to highlight how writing expands beyond being a tool for speech. The chapter ultimately demonstrates how deeply writing is intertwined with power, communication, and human imagination.

Origins of writing

Liu first focuses on the discourse on the ‘origins’ of writing to explain the first influences of writing in social systems and innovation. The first traces of scripts were found to have been invented separately in four different parts of the world, where each was characterised by urbanisation, division of labour, and a surplus economy. It is clear that writing was not just a product of culture, but also a practical innovation that emerged out of increasingly complex societies.

Each script is tied to material media (such as clay tablets, petroglyphs, and papyrus), highlighting how writing is also deeply technological and evolving alongside infrastructures of communication. Before these early scriptures, however, emerged semasiographs, or the use of iconic signs as a means of writing and communication. These forms of communication were first disregarded as writing by German linguist Florian Coulmas, who argued that all forms of graphic meaning, such as visual movement, syntax-like patterns, or rhythm, were not considered as being tied to writing. However, this classification evolved through the widespread use of the rebus principle, where a picture can be used to represent the sound of its name, rather than the object itself, marking a conceptual progression to non-language instances of illustration as writing. The chapter thus argues that there is no exact origin point of writing.

However, it is clear through early scripture that writing has evolved out of broader conditions of labour and communication. French archaeologist Andrè Leroi-Gourhan’s palaeontology of writing best supports Liu’s argument. In Gesture and Speech, Leroi-Gourhan studies early human ancestors to understand how their behaviour may relate to language. Here, he emphasises the neurological connection that the same parts of the brain are involved in tactile activities and using tools and also in the face and language. He uses the term ‘graphism’ to highlight this tactile, non-verbal form of communication to conclude that tool-making and language evolve alongside each other within human social life, where gesture and speech are intertwined, rather than being mutually exclusive.  

Writing in Governance

Connecting to Liu’s previous argument, it is clear that the early development of writing enabled new forms of organisation beyond oral traditions, easily seen as a symbol of knowledge and power across civilisations. Even early forms of storytelling prove that early civilisations understood the significance of writing through myths, legends and religion. Stories would characterise it as a ‘magical power,’ which later came to fruition as those who were literate and had access to writing held a monopoly on religious and political power in the form of Priests of the church. With this power, writing often allowed for the creation of new spatial and temporal configurations, as empires could easily sustain large colonies across far distances through written communication. This type of mass media production, as mentioned previously also in Chapter 18, ‘Mass Media’, can be seen in the monarchies of Egypt, Persia, and the Roman Empire. China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang of the Qin Dynasty, first proclaimed power through writing and scripture, where he imposed a standard script, orthography, and bureaucratic procedures for centralised rule. This started China’s long imperial history, and clearly would not have been possible if standard written script systems had not supported imperial rulers. 

Writing & Mathematics 

The development of ancient writing had strong early ties to predate methods for accurate tracking of numerical notation and record keeping, including weights, measures, and currency. Within the means of predated numerical notation, the earliest recorded transactions, dating back thousands of years, used pebbles, tallies, tokens, and clay containers or “bullae” — used in ancient Mesopotamia to show the marks of sealings indicating ownership to anything that was attached to it. In turn, this has led theorists to consider mathematics as the earliest precursor to writing. 

Though the consensus remains that writing has gone from pictographic to syllabic, and then to phoneticization, there remains the possibility that writing systems may have come from more semiotic scenarios rather than solely to record human speech. The etymology of the Phoenician word “spr” traces back to the English word “scribe.” The early meaning of the Phoenician word meant “to count”, but only later did it adopt the meaning of “to write.” The mutual ancestry between these words suggests that the alphabet and alphanumerical systems were the same. The ancient Greeks’  alphabet was already made up on the foundation of mathematics with its 24-letter system plus 3 alphanumeric signs of “digamma, koppi, and sampi” as well. 

The Global Evolution of Writing

Throughout time, the concept of writing has undergone extraordinarily vast changes from what we knew of it then to now: going back from using natural materials such as bronze, shells, or papyrus to the invention of print or electronic chips. Examining the global evolution of writing can be divided into the various empires throughout history. For instance, Ancient Egypt’s hieroglyphs were chiselled decoratively onto stone monuments, whereas writing on papyrus allowed for cursive of hieratic forms for quicker writing — the latter writing medium causing a large change in manuscript culture that shifted the forms of political organisation in history. The Roman Empire’s tradition of using papyrus “supported an emphasis on centralised bureaucratic administration,” whereas parchment in medieval Europe “helped give the church a monopoly of knowledge through monasticism,” according to Harold A. Innis. 

In Ancient China, the spread of Buddhism in the nation also prompted the invention of woodblock printing in the eighth century, where the mass production of printed books assisted in global socioeconomic transformation. Around the eleventh century, movable type was invented, a technology adopted in the printing of the earliest paper currency, which was used to hold control over the early economy in Asia as a whole. Over in Europe, around the fourteenth century, block printing and paper manufacturing came about as a result of the Mongol Empire’s westward expansion. This breakthrough translated into a rise in universal literacy, newspapers, advertising, and new forms of politics. 

Marshall McLuhan had observed the grand impact of printing on life in Europe and beyond, writing in the Gutenberg Galaxy, “the invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly line, and the first mass-production.” Thus, writing, in a sense, was the catalyst for all industrial practices to come after it, from its process of repetition to create a product for mass distribution.

Counting, notation, procedure: the road to algorithms

A second origin runs through numbers. Place-value numerals and operator symbols compress messy realities into portable strings. That compression invites procedures, do-this-then-that recipes someone else can repeat. In Liu’s telling, counting and inscribing were never far apart; even the word histories of “scribe” and “to count” cross. The point isn’t romantic; it’s practical: notation is writing tuned for calculation, a crucial bridge from tablets to code.

Materials change the message: paper, print, silicon

Writing’s substrates, bone, clay, papyrus, parchment, paper, type, and chips, aren’t background scenery. They reset speed, cost, and sameness, and with them, institutions. Paper and printing (in different historical paths) widened access; movable type accelerated repeatable precision and the rise of news, advertising, and mass politics. In the digital turn, text becomes addressable strings: searchable, sortable, and automatable, governed by file schemas, encodings, and protocols rather than just by clerks and courts.

Code is written—with machine readers

Alphabets loosely map signs to sounds; code maps signs to exact machine actions. In digital systems, a letter like “A” is an encoded value that can be copied without drift, checked for error, and executed in logic. Liu shows how modern information theory recasts “writing” as a statistical alphabet (including “space”) that machines can transmit and transform. Once marks are standardised for machines, the politics of writing shifts toward standards and interfaces, which set the fields, defaults, and labels that shape what’s sayable and searchable.

Tensions & connections (what ties the theories together) 

Speech-first vs. writing’s autonomy. A familiar hierarchy puts speech above writing. Our line, following Liu, flips the emphasis: writing has its own powers, coordination, inscription, calculability, that don’t depend on sounding like talk. This helps explain why ledgers, forms, and code can rearrange life without saying a word aloud.

Meaning vs. transmission. Engineering models treat writing as signals under noise, so messages travel reliably. That’s perfect for networks but thin on meaning; the trade-off is that standards (encodings, protocols, moderation rules) become the new chokepoints. The connection: what keeps symbols moving also decides which symbols move.

Media materials vs. institutions. Tools and substrates (brush, type, chip) shape what can be stored and processed; institutions harden around those capacities (schools, archives, platforms). This links McLuhan/Kittler-style media arguments to Liu’s core claim: writing is a world-building technology, not a transparent mirror.

Why this matters now

Change the format and you change the world: a new field on a platform form, a new label in a database, a tweak to an encoding, all are tiny acts of infrastructural authorship that decide what appears, what counts, and who gets heard. That’s writing’s power, from clay to code.

Summary: 

• No single origin. Writing didn’t just copy speech; it stabilised agreements and memories so complex societies could form.
  
• Power needs paperwork. Standard scripts and formats make populations legible—and governable.
  
• Notation –  procedure – algorithms. Compression invites repeatable methods; that’s the seed of software.
  
• Media matters. Substrate shifts (paper, print, silicon) rewire institutions and publics.
  
• Code extends writing. Machine-readable marks turn literacy into a fight over standards, schemas, and interfaces.