Six Languages: Speech, Writing, Math, Science, Computing, and the Internet
The next step in my study of languages beginning in the early 80s was to look at the impact of computers on education. My colleagues in this field were fond to point out that computers are informatic tools and I, loyal to my mentor Marshall McLuhan, insisted they were also a medium of communication. To me there was no conflict and I quickly concluded that computers are both a medium of communication and an informatic tool. After reaching this somewhat trivial conclusion I suddenly realized that this was also true of alphabetic writing as McLuhan and I had discovered in our study of the alphabet effect. I then generalized this idea and came to the conclusion that this was true of all forms of verbal language – they all allow us to communicate but they also help us to conceptualize (Logan 1995; 2000a). To my mind:
Language = Communications + Informatics

I also saw a pattern that connected the six forms of language into what I conceived of as an evolutionary chain of languages. Beginning with speech, each new form of language emerged to deal with the chaos of an information overload that arose with the use of the previous language(s). I made use of complexity theory and Prigogine’s notion that a new level of order emerges out of chaos, which in the case of languages manifests itself as an information overload. The new level of order that emerges to handle the information overload is a new form of language.

Writing and mathematical notation emerged in Sumer shortly before 3000 BC to make a record of the tributes paid by farmers to the priesthood. The clay tokens used to record the agricultural commodities paid by the farmers were placed in clay envelopes whose purpose was to keep all the tokens securely in one single container. In order not to have to break open the clay envelope each time to see what was inside it, the practice of pressing the tokens onto the outer surface of the clay envelope while it was still wet and before closing it began. It was quickly realized that once the impression were made on the outer surface of the envelope one did not need to place the tokens inside the envelop and seal it. Thus was born the impressed clay tablet with a written notation to represent the agricultural commodities and a notation for numbers to represent the quantity of those commodities. Writing and mathematics notation were thus an invention of accountants and civil servants and not writers or mathematicians (ibid.). Another interesting point is that writing and mathematics notation arose at exactly the same point in times as revealed by my analysis of the data of Schmandt-Besserat (1992), the archaeologist who first deciphered the meaning and function of the clay tokens. This means that the skills entailed in literacy and numeracy are parallel and similar. In other words, if one can read and write one should be able to do math, and vice versa, if one can do math one should be able to read and write.