The readings for this week made me continually think of the importance of text, and even the basic need for communication.  It made me think of some obscure things that I would otherwise not think too much about.  I mean text is a constant in our lives, you don’t very often just think about text and the importance of it and how it affects your life.   Text (beside a spoken language) is the greatest invention driven by need to communicate.  Since the earliest days of man, a person didn’t need many things.  But there was always the need to communicate.  The communication techniques were primitive as they mostly consisted of grunts and pointing to things, but that was all they had at the time.  The need for communication is there for every animal and mammal, but we are the strongest communicators.  Text is now a constant in every persons life.  It has become a need.  Nothing will last in our culture if it does not consist of any text.  A blank bottle from a soda company will never stay in the market.  It’s remarkable how something we aren’t even born with is so essential to our every day life.

Think of a world with no signs.  Signs are a very basic form of text and communication, but they are so incredibly essential to our lives.  Traveling and being in places outside of your own town could prove almost impossible to do without a simple sign to tell you where you are or to indicate any type of information you may be in search for.  Think with a product or restaurant.  You would never have a chance of opening up a location that provides services, or selling a product with nothing to tell you what it is, without text.  Everything in this world must have a name.  We have to be able to recognize a person, location or thing by some kind of label or name.  There is nothing in the world that exists that somebody doesn’t have a name for.

The capability of text gives you instant knowledge about something.  If you see a restaurant with no text outside stating its name, you probably won’t know it’s name unless you ask somebody.  But text allows you to walk by such a place and at least know what it’s called without any inquiry.  It’s presented to you and then you instantly know one bit of information, whether you were interested in knowing it or not, that would have otherwise not know.  Text allows you to learn and absorb even when you have no idea your doing it.  A literate person subconsciously absorbs thousands of messages a day and text has a giant part to do with it.