The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and 
electronic faces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial 
role in staying the return to the Africa within.

*     The invention of the alphabet, like the invention of the wheel, 
was the translation or reduction of a complex, organic interplay 
of spaces into a single space. The phonetic alphabet reduced 
the use of all the senses at once, which is oral speech, to a 
merely visual code. Today, such translation can be effected 
back and forth through a variety of spatial forms which we call 
the “media of communication.” But each of these spaces has 
unique properties and impinges upon our other senses or 
spaces in unique ways.

     Today, then, it is easy to understand the invention of the 
alphabet because, as A. N. Whitehead pointed out in Science