In this programme, Stephen Fry explores 'the written word'.
Writing is a great invention - making it possible to communicate
across space and time. Without writing we would have no history
and very little technology. Stephen discovers the earliest
writing - cuneiform - at the British Museum, and learns how our
alphabet came from the Phoenicians. As part of his exploration
of the diversity of scripts, Stephen visits 106-year-old Mr
Zhou, the inventor of the Chinese phonetic writing system called
Pinyin, who relates how literacy increased four-fold after its
introduction under Mao. After the written word came the printed
word, and Stephen looks at how this has shaped our relationship
with writing, giving us libraries, dictionaries and
encyclopaedias. From the Bodleian to Diderot's favourite café to
the cutting-edge research at MIT, Stephen explores how the
written word evolved into printing, then libraries,
encyclopaedias and computer code. Blogging and twittering is
just the tip of a brave new future which no