I'll Never Look At A Note Scribbled On The Back Of A Crumpled Grocery Receipt in The Same Way...

[badstar]

"Though writing has become the most commonplace of information technologies, it remains in many ways the most magical. Brought into focus by properly educated eyes, artificial glyphs scrawled onto the surface of objects leap unbidden into the mind, bringing with them sounds, meanings and data. In fact, it is very difficult to gaze intentionally upon a page of script written in a known language and not automatically begin reading it. The ecophilosopher David Abram notes that, just as a Zuni elder might focus her eyes upon a cactus and hear the succulent begin to speak, so do we hear voices printed out of our printed alphabets. "This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless- as mysterious as a talking stone."

Techgnosis, pg. 23