How do you feel about writing? Does that sound like a bizarre question? OK, what about this? Do you worry that you don’t read enough? About the encroachment of screen time into book time? About the decline of letter-writing or penmanship? In universities, where ChatGPT has made a nightmare of written assessments, lecturers have had to fall back on viva voce interviews to determine whether students are the true authors of the essays they submit. My hunch is that writing – the idea of writing – is now more fretted over than celebrated; that what we feel towards this venerable invention is, on the whole, something like a complex of anxieties.

At the same time, of course, there is a wild negativity bias going on here. Our species, suggests Walter Stephens, might as well be called Homo scribens, Man the Writer. ‘Writing,’ he notes, ‘is the one accomplishment we do not share with Neanderthals and our other ancestors.’ Imagine there’s no writing. It’s not that easy:

No pencils, no pens, no paper, no grocery lists. No chalkboards, typewriters or printing presses, no letters or books. No computers or word processors, no email or internet, no social media; and without binary code – strings of ones and zeroes that create computer programs – no viewable archives, no film or television either.

So we can be at once anxious about our relationship to writing while at the same time acknowledging how lost we would be without it.

Even Plato recognised this ambivalence. In one dialogue, the Phaedrus, he has Socrates recount a story in which the Egyptian god Theuth, having invented writing, is admonished for it: ‘This discovery will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls because they will not use their memories.’ Worst of all, people who rely on writing will be ‘tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality’. If you’ve ever stood next to a writer at a party you will know just how wise these words turned out to be.

But Plato is also aware of writing’s social value. In another dialogue, the Timaeus, he tells a story in which the great Athenian lawgiver Solon visits Egypt and is shamed by the priests there for how little he knows of his own people’s history. His sense of the past is ‘no better than the tales of children’, whereas the Egyptians, thanks to their written records, know more about Athens than the Athenians.

In How Writing Made Us Human we are presented with a history of writing in the western world. Not just its origins in the pictograms and cuneiform triangles of the ancient Near East, but its origin myths too: the Babylonian fish monster, the lost library of Ozymandias, the pillars of Seth – third son of Adam and Eve – on which the astrological wisdom of the ancient world was said to have been recorded.

From here we move through the usual stations of book history: the library of Alexandria, the Bible and its translations, the printing press. All of this is well told but fairly familiar. The value-added that Stephens claims to provide is a concentration on what people felt about what they were doing, ‘the emotional history of writing’. Whether we always get this, I am not sure. What is offered is pretty broadbrush: the book-hunters of the 15th century were gloomy at the loss of so much classical learning; Gutenberg’s press produced a period of optimism. In reality, as we have seen, the emotions we feel about something as fundamental to our lives as writing will tend to be rather more complex and variegated than this.

Still, there is much to enjoy here. How Writing Made Us Human tells its tales well. It is accessible but still reassuringly knowledgeable. Stephens holds his hands up to admit that his expertise extends only to western history. Similarly, he tells us that for reasons of space his final chapter, treating the 70 years since the middle of the 20th century, will be briefly sketched. This will not quite do.

Let’s think back to Plato’s ambivalence: the cynicism of the Phaedrus and the wonder of the Timaeus. Stephens suggests that these mixed feelings have their origins in the transition that was underway in ancient Greece from an oral culture to a literate one, ‘a process that reached a watershed moment during Plato’s lifetime’. But what about our ambivalence, our own watershed moment? We are living through an age in which Homo scribens has lost the monopoly on his greatest invention, but How Writing Made Us Human has nothing to say about the idea that writing may not make us human any more. What might have been a timely book misses its mark because Stephens fails to roll his sleeves up and think about the present.

Aside from that gesture to binary code, he simply ignores the fact that ‘writing’ means far more than just the cuneiform, hieroglyphs or Roman letters that he wants to talk about. Yet innovations over the past couple of centuries – think the Morse code of the telegraph tapper, or the ASCII encoding that can flatten the alphabet into a series of noughts and ones – have meant that letters are now just one form of the most adaptable writing system of all: the electrical signal. Between me typing it and you reading it, the words that form this review have been sent and stored in the same binary digits as the signal from Radio 4 coming through my speakers or the JPEG files that illustrate the article. It’s all writing.

A few years ago, the novelist Tom McCarthy made the following observation:

There’s hardly an instant of our lives that isn’t documented. Walk down any stretch of street and you’re being filmed by three cameras at once – and the phone you carry in your pocket is pinpointing and logging your location at each given moment. Every website that you visit, each keystroke and click-through are archived: even if you’ve hit delete or empty trash it’s still there, lodged within some data fold or enclave, some occluded-yet-retrievable avenue of circuitry.

Writing has slipped our leash. Our modern selves are ultra-surveilled and endlessly written, our movements, purchases, step counts, browsing histories all carefully recorded in the vast, supercooled server farms of Utah and Nevada. Our everyday lives, in all their banality, are dutifully journalled by machines to be read only by other machines programmed to sell us more stuff. Now, how does that make you feel?