Washington Post Cites Grosswiler Study in Article on New Google Company Name
The Washington Post cited a 2004 study by University of Maine communication and journalism professor Paul Grosswiler in the article, “The big cultural debate simmering beneath Google’s new Alphabet name.” Google’s new parent company name, Alphabet, was “designed to evoke the ingenuity of the human spirit,” according to the article, even though more than 1.3 billion people don’t use an alphabet as their primary writing system. The idea that there is a “best” writing system implies that others are inferior, and critics of this theory have argued that this is a Western-centric bias, the article states. “The alphabetic literacy theory has asserted the West’s permanent superiority over the East due to the psychological and cultural effects of the alphabet. Science, philosophy, logic, rationality, democracy and monotheism are said to be inextricably linked to the alphabet in this theory,” Grosswiler wrote in his 2004 study, “Dispelling the Alphabet Effect,” which was published in the Canadian Journal of Communication. Rationality is a common characteristic to all human cultures, the article states. Asian concepts of yin and yang, as well as theories of elemental properties such as fire and water, could be thought of as a kind of classification system for explaining nature, according to Grossweiler.