because there is a natural speed at which we communicate. According to Harnad, this natural speed is set by the pace of verbal discourse.All this is going to change, according to Harnad, as the scholars begin exploiting the potential of electronic communication for lightning speed electronic discourse and interactive scholarly endeavor. When this happens, the limitations on human thinking will be finally shattered and scholarship will take to the skies.(60)Harnad justifies his historical template on the following grounds.The reason I single out as revolutionary only speech, writing, and print in this panorama of media transformations that shaped how we communicate is that I think only those three had a qualitative effect on how we think. In a nutshell, speech made it possible to make propositions, hand-writing made it possible to preserve them speaker-independently, and print made it possible to preserve them hand-writer-independently. All three had a dramatic effect on how we thought as well as on how we expressed our thoughts, so arguably they had an equally dramatic effect on what we thought (Harnad, 1991: 41).There are numerous problems with Harnad's analysis not the least of which is his attribution of a "natural" speed for human discourse. This smacks of essentialist arguments about human nature that need to be seriously addressed and not simply glossed over and ignored. There is also a problem with the notion that a human verbal conversation should be the benchmark against which we gauge other modes of communication. There is simply no justification for thinking that verbal communication is any more natural than writing or printing. This is like suggesting, after McLuhan, that since the emergence of writing in Mesopotamia, humans have lived in a diachronic-alphabetic straightjacket. This is, of course, technological determinism at its finest. Isn't it more reasonable to consider writing and speech as two different sides of a sam...
