Does Writing Accelerate or Slow Down Cultural Change?

Written language is one of humanity’s most important information technologies. Without it, many mathematical and scientific discoveries could have been lost to history. Yet writing may also preserve ideas long after they stop making sense.

So does writing accelerate cultural change—or slow it down?

How writing can preserve—and restrict—ideas

Russell Gray, a professor in the Department of Language and Culture Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, is leading a research project examining how writing influences language change. His team uses methods borrowed from evolutionary biology to track languages through family trees, much as biologists track species.

Language is an element of culture that researchers can measure to investigate whether writing speeds up or slows down cultural change.

“The obvious answer is that you write slower,” Gray said, because writing is “all codified and specific, and people are trained in it.” But he does not think the obvious answer is necessarily correct. Some researchers argue that writing can lock in ways of thinking, while others believe it helps culture evolve more rapidly.

Charles Perrault, an associate professor in Arizona State University’s Department of Human Evolution and Social Change, described this process as “canalization,” a term used by learning psychologists.

“It can narrow the scope of how people think about a problem,” Perrault told Live Science in an email. “Once a rule, a method, a story is written down, people may come to think that is the correct version—and may not even consider that there could be a better or different way.”

Religious texts and legal codes illustrate this effect. In both cases, written interpretations created hundreds or even thousands of years ago can continue shaping behavior long after the circumstances that produced them have changed.

Writing may make cultural traditions more stable

The stabilizing effect of writing can also be seen in artistic expression. In a 2017 analysis, ethnomusicologist Patrick Savage and colleagues studied more than 4,000 Anglo-American ballads from the 16th through the 20th centuries.

They found that written melodies varied less than melodies passed through oral tradition. This suggests that writing can preserve a particular version of a song or story, limiting the changes that might otherwise occur as it is shared from person to person.

How writing can accelerate cultural change

Writing may also speed up cultural evolution by allowing people to store knowledge outside the human brain.

“A lot of cultural knowledge had to be stored in people’s brains before they could write,” Perrault said. “There are clearly limits to that.”

Without regular study, people forget information. When people die, knowledge stored only in their memories can disappear with them. Writing reduces these losses by preserving information beyond the individual mind.

Writing can also spread knowledge across society, especially when combined with technologies such as the printing press.

“If writing prevents the loss of knowledge and, like the printing press, helps spread information through society, it could accelerate the ratchet effect of cumulative cultural evolution,” Perrault said. “But this remains somewhat hypothetical.”

Why the answer is difficult to prove

One reason it is difficult to determine whether written language speeds up or slows down cultural evolution is that writing rarely appears alone. It usually develops alongside major changes in trade, warfare, religion and other forms of human interaction.

Writing was invented independently only around four times throughout human history. Gray noted that some people argue there may have been a fifth independent script in India. Nearly every writing system on Earth is therefore descended from a small number of systems, which later spread through contact between societies.

That history makes it difficult to separate the effects of writing from the effects of the social forces that helped spread it.

“It’s only recently that mass literacy has increased,” Gray said. “If you have documents on hand that are only used by religious elites, the impact could be much smaller.”

Does writing ultimately speed up cultural change?

Both experts believe that writing probably accelerates cultural change overall, although researchers have not yet proved it.

“I think writing probably accelerates the overall cultural change,” Perrault said. Gray agreed, while acknowledging that many people would assume writing has the opposite effect.

Still, Perrault emphasized that the question remains open: “These are empirical questions that have not yet been answered empirically.”