For this week’s blog, I will talk about Johanna Drucker’s “Comparative Textual Media”. Specifically, I will focus on one of her chapters called “From A Screen”. In this chapter, Drucker talks about letters and the alphabet. She brings up “who created the alphabet?”. That is a good question. Most people believe it was the Greeks. Others do not believe it was the Greeks. Everyone has a different idea of how the alphabet was created. Drucker did debunk this concept by saying “The Semitic language speakers forged an alphabet to serve a tongue whose consonantal morphemes communicated adequately without vowels, and the technical specifications for their writing were different than for the Greeks, who later modified the writing for their own use”(Drucker, 2013). However, who is to say that the Greeks didn’t invent letters? They simply just changed what they learned. Other cultures also do this with letters and make it their own to fit into their society. Letters and the alphabet change throughout cultures, however, they all consist of the alphabet that is conditioned into our minds when we were young. The ABC song is the same, but in every culture it’s different. It isn’t about who came up with it first, it’s about who can modify it into their own.

References: HAYLES, N. KATHERINE, and JESSICA PRESSMAN, editors. Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era. University of Minnesota Press, 2013