When people first encounter writing, they often play with words, as if words were newly discovered things, subject to limitless spatial rearrangement. The multilevel complexity of oral language is not immediately lost with the coming of literacy: instead, it is shifted to spatial configurations.

Written words do, of course, exist in space & can be physically rearranged. This discovery often leads to the invention of spatial word games. These have been popular in many cultures, especially where literacy is fresh & numerology, astrology & alchemy are professional pursuits.

Vestiges of such games survive in our culture. We have the palidromes ABLE WAS I ERE I SAW ELBA, Napoleon's lament, and MADAM, I'M ADAM, allegedly man's first statement. Both read the same backward & forward. James Thurber's NOW NO SWIMS ON MON reads the same upside down.

Words may be read downward, as in street signs, or in the vertical columns of crossword puzzles, or in acrostic verse where the initial letters of each line of a poem, taken together, form a word or name.

Words may be concealed within words: "Her very C's, her U's, 'n' her T's" (Twelfth Night, II:88).

In a rear mirror, ECNALUBMA reads AMBULANCE, while through the windshield reads CROSSING.

A letter sent to
was allegedly delivered to John Underwood, Andover, Massachusetts.

We sometimes convert telephone & postal numbers into words, for words are easier to remember, e.g., the telephone number NERVOUS, the New York City number giving the correct time.

The letters of the early Hebrew alphabet also served as numerals: scribes played at making combined word-mathematical statements.

In New Guinea, I was particularly interested in graffiti, doodles, signs combining words, in symbols & pictures, bulletin-board notices, private letters, scribblings chalked on school blackboards after hours, etc. There was abundant material to fill my interest. Even students who had mastered penmanship sometimes departed from sequential order to fill space by wholly different means. The spatial logic of local signs often had to be discovered, but once discovered, was usually clear & sometimes ingenious.

I think this aspect of language should be given maximum encouragement in New Guinea, not only as a means of furthering literacy, but as a means of muting radio. I see radio as potentially very dangerous, especially where it lacks serious competition from other media. Radio's role in North Africa & Indonesia should serve as a warning. In each place, it broke down small, traditional tribes, then retribalized the populations as a whole, building nationalism to a feverish pitch & creating unreasonable national goals & consumer hopes. Radio simply does not promote the sort of social structure & economic specialization necessary for an increase both in living standard & military might, though both are easily promised via airwaves.

Those who control the content of radio take such arguments lightly. To them, what matters is what radio says. To me, what matters is what radio does. They regard radio as a neutral instrument & place full responsibility for its use on people. I see nothing "neutral" about my technology. To me, all technologies are human extensions & those extensions create different people.

Radio in New Guinea could easily come to dominate the sensory lives of the village people. If the government insists on its expansion, then I think support should be given to activities that favor individualism, specialization, privacy, enclosed space, etc., that is, activities producing effects opposite from those produced by radio. Print, of course, comes first to mind. But accelerating the current literacy program would require major financing, as well as create its own problems. I think a great deal could be achieved, with minimum expenditure, by promoting abstract spatial games.

For example, I would promote chess. Chess is an art of pure location. A player must sequentially reorder units & unit clusters by visualizing how they would look in a succession of subsequent spaces. The chessman lie "out there," but future moves must lie in graphic clarity in the player's mind.

The rules of chess are easily learned, yet as George Steiner notes, "There are more possible variants in a game at chess than it is calculated there are atoms in this sprawling universe. The number of possible legitimate ways of playing the first four moves on each side comes to 318,979,584,000. Playing one game a minute and never repeating it, the entire population of the globe would need two hundred and sixteen billion years to exhaust all conceivable ways of playing the first ten moves."

Chess might find a waiting audience in New Guinea. Interest is often high in cultures where literacy is fresh & no single medium is dominant. Chess requires negligible equipment. Any space serves. Players need nothing in common, save love of chess, for chess is unrelated to culture, language, age. Along with music & mathematics, it is one of the few fields in which there are child prodigies. It doesn't derive from the world "out there" & cannot be translated into that world. It doesn't prepare people for employment and this, too, at the moment is an advantage, for in New Guinea it's easier to prepare people for employment than to provide employment.

Unlike cards, chess is rarely played for money. It's a game of pure skill, not chance, and therefore without appeal to gamblers.

Obviously, chess by itself is hardly a sufficient counterforce to radio. But combined with a number of other media, each of which favors visual space or segmented time, I think it should be promoted. By "other media" I specifically mean: literacy; portrait photography; photo comic books; crossword puzzles; huge mirrors erected in public places; aerial photographs of villages, displayed in those villages beneath clocks that signal the hour; etc.

Such suggestions are certain to amuse administrators who place their faith in technology & good intentions. But in a small way they could help correct sensory & psychic imbalances created by radio. Obviously nothing is going to turn off radio, but its effects can be turned down within the interior environment of the self.