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The Consequences of Literacy
Goody and Watt's 1963 essay that launched the research program on cognitive and social consequences of writing — the founding document of what became technologies of the intellect.
The 1963 essay 'The Consequences of Literacy,' co-authored with the literary scholar Ian Watt, established the research program Goody would pursue for the next fifty years. The essay argued that the transition from oral to literate culture produces specific, identifiable changes in how societies organize knowledge, constitute authority, and reason about the world. Writing permits the preservation and accumulation of knowledge across generations in ways oral tradition cannot. It enables critical comparison of claims, because written statements are fixed and can be examined alongside one another. It produces a particular relationship between individual and tradition, where authority shifts from living elders to canonical texts. These changes are not merely social; they have cognitive correlates that can be documented through careful comparison.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The essay appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History and was immediately controversial. Its claims about the cognitive consequences of alphabetic literacy in ancient Greece — particularly the argument that Greek democracy, philosophy, and