I was listening to an audiobook yesterday and there was a brief discussion of pre-literature societies and how they transmit knowledge through storytelling. And while it wasn’t the point of the book, that got me wondering how much knowledge can be maintained that way.
Literacy essentially lets you put information into storage when it’s not being used. Nobody has to actively remember a specific bit of information if it can be looked up when it’s needed. And conversely, without literacy, every bit of information requires that somebody has to memorize it or it’s lost. So the maximum amount of information that a non-literate society can have is the collective memories of its members.
And that’s a theoretical maximum. In reality, people are fallible storage units for information. You can’t have each person memorizing their own unique information; if they did, that information would be lost when that person dies. And memories are faulty; you need to have people remembering overlapping information so there can be correction when one person misremembers something. And mortality means that information is only retained if older people continuously pass it on to younger people.
Is there a way of objectively measuring how large a body of knowledge is? And if so, has anyone determined how large a collective body of knowledge can be held by a non-literate society?
I’m wondering how much of an effect the development of literacy had in terms of knowledge. Does literacy double the amount of information a society has access to? Increase it tenfold? A hundredfold?
Surely, the factor by which literacy increases knowledge depends on how long it’s been since the society developed literacy. If you take a preliterate society and give them literacy (and the ability to produce books quickly, and in unlimited quantity), then of course they’ll start by writing down everything they know… but they also of course won’t write down anything that they don’t know. So immediately post-literacy, their total knowledge base won’t be any larger than it was immediately pre-literacy.
Let that same society progress a thousand years, though, and they’ll still have all of that knowledge, much of which would have been lost without literacy, but they’ll also have all of the new knowledge they’ve gained since then.
I don’t think there is a clear answer because literate and societies devoted to knowledge were routinely invaded by the barbarians (or holy warriors depending on your viewpoint). Their books and libraries were burnt down.
So as part of the on going debate about the origins of Homeric poetry the scholar Milman Parry measured how much the contemporary (i.e. pre WW2) non-literate epic poets in Yugoslavia can recall. It turns out it was A LOT, far more than was considered possible in a literate society. Of course I can’t find the exact number but IIRC it was 100,000s of lines of verse lasting many hours. All from memory (with the help of the fact that epic poems like the Illiad have repeating phrases and poetic structure that makes it easier to remember)
It sounds like a lot, but is it really all that much in objective terms?
Consider your example of the Iliad. People used to recite it from memory, which is an impressive feat.
But print a copy of the Iliad and it fits into a single book. I have several hundred books in the room I’m sitting in. It would take a major effort to organize a large group of people to memorize the contents of these books and to keep all of that information going for generations. And the books in this room are a small fraction of what you’d find in a small town public library.
It’s the same thing with the example GreenWyvern cited. Yes, it sounds impressive that an indigenous group had information about over a thousand different species. But our literate society has the equivalent information about millions of species.
I think the thing is that as humans, we judge feats of memory by human terms. So we’re impressed by the amounts of information these people are able to memorize. We can’t relate in the same way to how much information we’ve stored in written records so we can’t appreciate how much larger that body of knowledge is.
Which brings us back to my original question; is there any objective way of measuring how much a society collectively knows?
Or to look at it another way: Fill up your phone with all of your favorite songs. You can probably sing along with all of them, right? You could, in fact, fill up quite a few hours with songs that you can sing along to. And that’s just from spending your leisure time on it: Imagine if it were literally your job to memorize songs, and you spent most of your waking hours on it. And now think of, say, your 100 closest friends: Probably one of them is even better at memorizing songs than you are, and that’s the one who would have been the primary lore-keeper of your tribe.
Memorising the Illiad would be impressive but not something we’d consider impossible in modern society. What Perry measured was the equivalent of memorising the entire canon that the Illiad was part of. Far more than we’d consider possible.
Also…
That’s the just the storyteller, your pre-literate society isn’t just storytellers, the healer, architect, merchant all have potential to remember that amount of information. Combined it all adds up.
The room your in now probably contains more information than all the books in existence for most of literate society’s history (or at least actively being read vs buried beneath the ruins if a sacked city), and your local library definitely does.
Most literate societies don’t have much evidence of writing beyond tax records.
That is of course is the big difference between literate and non-literate societies. A non-literate society can store a ton of information but the second the person with the information and the person they are passing it on to bite the dust at the same time it’s gone
While story-telling is open to all sorts of risks, we probably overstate the actual reliable retention of information in literate societies by comparison.
A reply that someone like Lynne Kelly may have would be that rather than the total quantum of knowledge, what a non-literate society memorises is the right amount to ensure that their relevant world is understood and doesn’t throw up any surprises. Any more is empty calories.
Outside storytelling, storage and retrieval in literate societies is the critical issue, and archivists know just how precarious that is.
Books will survive in optimal conditions, maybe, while electronic data has to go through a constant process of refreshing and copying, not unlike story-telling. Otherwise the world’s knowledge of Commodore 64 hacks and cat videos may go in a careless blackout. Intelligibility and readability of old digital data cannot be assumed either.
I just want to make sure I’m clear on what people are saying. Those of you who have said that people can remember large amounts of information, are you saying that you feel the total amount of information that a society can store by human memory is comparable in size to the total amount of information that a society can store by the use of writing?
I just want to make sure I’m clear on what people are saying. Those of you who have said that people can remember large amounts of information, are you saying that you feel the total amount of information that a society can store by human memory is comparable in size to the total amount of information that a society can store by the use of writing?
Well clearly not, as the total amount of information that a society can store by the use of writing is for practical purposes, infinite.
But the amount of information a non-literate society can have is also very large, certainly larger than the total amount of information most literate societies stored in writing prior to the modern (i.e. post-renaissance for western societies) era.
Obviously the amount of information stored by literate societies is vastly more than illiterate societies. Nobody would suggest otherwise.
Objectively? No.
You can count the number of books, but a physics textbook is going to contain more knowledge than a story book for young children. A dictionary is going to contain more information than a celebrity biography. Exactly how much more? How can you ‘objectively’ measure that?
You can look at the quantity of data stored, but a cat video and the census data for the past 100 years might take up the same amount of storage space. Can you quantify how much ‘knowledge’ is stored in each, and what their exact relative value is?
Just as in literate societies, the info is not known by all and not stored in one place. So, too, go non literate societies.
And it depends on what you mean by knowledge.
There is much info that loses fidelity when written down. Such as the feelings of love between two people. Poets have written millions of words on the subject. Musicians millions of notes. Painters millions of brush strokes. And all of that knowledge combined doesn’t equal a fraction of the actual experience that you or I know.
Given some of the posts, I thought there might be some people who feel otherwise.
Philosophers have been studying epistemology for centuries and scientists have been studying information theory for a few decades. I’m not an expert in either field but I know they exist. So I feel it’s a reasonable question to ask if some generally accepted standards have been developed. If you’re studying knowledge and information it seems like one of the first steps is to define what they are and try to measure them.
Yes, a good point to clarify. The relative amounts of knowledge ‘stored’ will be vastly different. The point I wanted to highlight is that the literate society’s store of knowledge is very heavily contingent on a mix of good forward planning and luck.
Anything on paper will survive only if the paper is stored in good conditions and not more valuable as fuel or papier-mache stock, assuming it was made of reasonable quality pulp. Most newspaper is now crumbling.
Anything that is on video tape which is not copied to another medium will perish in the coming decade or so.
Anything digital will be unreadable once the last reader for that is scrapped.
The lucky-dip of information left after these culling processes play out will still be huge, but unless you properly decide on what to keep, you will have no guarantee that any of the knowledge is itself worth knowing.
1625 items is a good chunk of knowledge. But it doesn;t seem to be all that difficult. Much of it would come easily, as a matter of day-to-day life.
I don’t know 1625 species of anything.
But I do know 30 types of fruit, 30 types of trees, 20 breeds of dog, 20 species of fish, 50 “species” of automobiles, 30 “species” of tools , 30 “species” of clothing items,10 types of foreign currency, etc…And all of this without taking lessons and actively trying to learn it…it’s just common knowledge from my experience and physical contact with the objects I see around me. No literacy required.
If I lived in the Philippine jungles, I would over my lifetime learn the names of every plant and every animal which I saw–because I would have to know if it is edible or life-threatening, etc.
If there are 1625 such plants and animals, I don’t think it’s too difficult to imagine learning them all.
I think there’s a distinction to be drawn among the amount of information held by the society as a whole, the amount of such information commonly accessed by humans in general, and the amount of information held/used by any given individual.
I doubt that last one has changed much, if at all. Modern people in literate societies tend to know different things than pre-literate people do, that’s all. And while we may theoretically have access to near-infinite amounts of information on-line, there’s only so much that any one person can process enough to make any sense of it.
While different people are processing different things, and therefore a society with a lot of people can actively hold more information than one with fewer, I suspect that some of our supposed information isn’t really being processed by anybody; it just gets stashed somewhere in electronic form, not significantly different in effect from the source information just existing as part of the universe.
The amount of information held by the society in storage is greater in literate than in non-literate societies – though I think two good points have been made: one, that information in storage is fragile in various ways depending on the type of storage; and two, that only some kinds of information store well in written forms. Both of those things are also true for oral transmission – but many people tend to think of them as only being true for oral transmission, when they’re also true of our current forms of keeping information.
