The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet 
translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral 
visual world.

*     J. C. Carothers, writing in Psychiatry  (November, 1959) on 
“Culture, Psychiatry and the Written Word,” set forth a number 
of observations contrasting nonliterate natives with literate 
natives, and the nonliterate man with the Western man 
generally. He starts (p. 308) with the familiar fact that

     by reason of the type of educational influences that 
     impinge upon Africans in infancy and early childhood, and 
     indeed throughout their lives, a man comes to regard 
     himself as a rather insignificant part of a much larger 
     organism—the family and the clan—and not as an 
     independent, self-reliant unit; personal initiative and