Linear writing: (2:45) - Television Image and Political Space
Flusser says there are at least two ways of interpreting the history of the world. One is through images and the other one is through linear writing. Through images, we create a scene for the viewer and thus make it more theatrical, more chaotic, and not precise. According to Flusser, looking at history through images is not optimal because he thinks an image can be interpreted in different ways. Everyone has got an individual way of perception. A person will based on one's background, interpret a picture in one's own way.
Only through linear writing history can be delivered rationally and truthfully, and this was the reason why linear writing was invented, to explain the pictures that depicted the world around us.
Flusser further explains that in a linear history everything is an “event”. Before the invention of linear writing, there was no history, only happenings. By looking at history in this way you view the world as a process. Nothing happens by chance because every event has a cause and an effect on another event. Everything can be rationally explained.
In the video “Human History as Television Drama at (20:10) he adds that about 7.000 years ago people in Mesopotamia invented linear writing so that they could become aware of processes, of history.