the print phase of alphabetic culture. The print phase, however, 
has encountered today the new organic and biological modes 
of the electronic world. That is, it is now interpenetrated at its 
extreme development of mechanism by the electrobiological, as 
de Chardin has explained. And it is this reversal of character 
which makes our age “connatural,” as it were, with nonliterate 
cultures. We have no more difficulty in understanding the 
native or nonliterate experience, simply because we have 
recreated it electronically within our own culture. (Yet post-
literacy is a quite different mode of interdependence from pre-
literacy.) So my dwelling upon the earlier phases of alphabetic 
technology is not irrelevant to an understanding of the 
Gutenberg era.

     Colin Cherry had this to say about early writing: