Animated Hieroglyphics

Do Egyptian hieroglyphics help us understand Youtube?
Does Youtube help us understand ancient Egyptian art?

We are seeing numerous changes in the ways we read and write. Today, embedded Youtube “clips” (Youtubes?) are used as compositional units for a new kind of writing. Electronic “texts” built from one or more Youtubes are frequently devoid of letters from a phonetic alphabet (save in cases where a URL is used in place of an embed). Perhaps, the closest example in human history of a similar writing system can be found in the “cooler” and “culturally richer” hieroglyphics of the near-East and ancient Egypt:

"The phonetic alphabet did not change or extend man so drastically just because it enabled him to read; as you point out, tribal culture had already coexisted with other written languages for thousands of years. But the phonetic alphabet was radically different from the older and richer hieroglyphic or ideogrammic cultures. The writings of Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan and Chinese cultures were an extension of the senses in that they gave pictorial expression to reality, and they demanded many signs to cover the wide range of data in their societies -- unlike phonetic writing, which uses semantically meaningless letters to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds and is able, with only a handful of letters, to encompass all meanings and all languages. This achievement demanded the separation of both sights and sounds from their semantic and dramatic meanings in order to render visible the actual sound of speech, thus placing a barrier between men and objects and creating a dualism between sight and sound. It divorced the visual function from the interplay with the other senses and thus led to the rejection from consciousness of vital areas of our sensory experience and to the resultant atrophy of the unconscious. The balance of the sensorium -- or Gestalt interplay of all the senses -- and the psychic and social harmony it engendered was disrupted, and the visual function was overdeveloped. This was true of no other writing system" (Marshall McLuhan, “The Playboy Interview”).

The current parallel between Ancient Egypt and our own time also appears to be permitting discoveries for “scholars” working in the “other” direction. Recently, for example, Dr. Eric McLuhan has discovered how the ancient Egyptians developed an “animation” technique, grounded in the calculated admission of ambiguities, that makes their figures appear to “dance.” Certain silhouette type drawings (e.g. like the one included), Eric McLuhan shows, appear in one instant to be facing the viewer and in the next moment facing away. This quality makes the image appear to be in constant motion -- walking like an Egyptian.