This article revisits the argument of Metcalfe and Joham (2003): Those interested in equity, knowledge diversity, and social and economic development need to place more emphasis on the functionality of oral communications technologies. Western organizations, through the availability and accessibility of asynchronous visual forms of their orality, are able to communicate across languages, time, and vast audiences repeatedly. They thereby share their knowledge more effectively than oral communities. Despite being multimedia, the Internet has the potential to exacerbate the problem if it develops the functionality of written communication over oral. Jones (1996) acknowledges that the Internet is a technology invented and developed by what he calls the "writing class" and Chandler (2002) calls the "eye people;" people who learn and make their living by trading in an asynchronous visual form of their knowledge, typically writing. Urbanized scientists, lawyers, and public servants are obvious examples. However, these people, and the explicit text-based knowledge in which they trade, are a minority use of communication and maybe they do not even use written communication for innovation. Writing cultures appear to economically 1 dominate oral ones; however, this may not be because of graphy per se, but rather because of the advantages of having the appropriate mix of oral and recorded and synchronous and asynchronous communication technologies.
This article argues that those people who care about equity and knowledge diversity need to give more thought to technologies that assist, in particular, asynchronous oral communication. They need to move away from what Chandler (2002) calls "Graphocentrism": giving graphy an assumed privilege over orality. This is not just an issue for developing countries, as the popularity of the telephone and radio in the more developed countries suggests. Graphy, especially written knowledge, is inextricably linked to issues of objectivism, a universal rather than personal value system and the dominance of legalized relationships. Moreover, graphy forms of communication are of limited use for complex craft, skills-based knowledge sharing, like engineering, farming and equity. The majority 1 Economic but perhaps not social development.