and animals, improvising music together, and just hanging out. Mary Beth prefers to wait until after dinner to log onto her college classes, using her online VIVO wall monitor at home to see and talk with her professors and college classmates.
Thomas wants to go swimming at the community pool in the afternoon, so he decides to do his schoolwork this morning. Logging onto the VIVO wall unit near his bed, he joins a Comparative Cosmology class that’s comparing a 5000-year-old Nubian theory of the universe, Albert Einstein’s 145-year-old Theory of Relativity, and Benita Lopez’s most recent revision (2048) of the Unified Field Theory. After a few seconds online, Thomas is debating the pros and cons of the various theories with his teacher and schoolmates, and storing on his VIVO the parts of the discussion that he’ll want to re-access.
After Kathy’s “column” and Thomas’ schoolwork are finished, they get into their electromagnetic hovercar and head to Kathy’s mother’s apartment for lunch and a visit. As they pull away from the curb, Kathy speaks her password to the car’s VIVO computer, placing the car’s motion functions under the control of the regional AUTOLINK system. Kathy tells the VIVO that their destination is her mother’s apartment; then, she and Thomas lean back and relax. VIVO and AUTOLINK take over from there.
Along the roads and expressways that Kathy’s car is traveling, there are no written signs designating street names, expressway exits, or speed limits. They’re not necessary since the car’s movement is being electronically controlled and its location constantly monitored by satellites. If Kathy wants to know the name of the street they are on, she will just ask her VIVO. As a visual backup, their VIVO monitor displays their trip both as an icon moving along a (wordless) roadmap and as an actual satellite view of their car moving along the highway.
At times, Kathy asks her VIVO to comment on traffic and weather conditions, street names and numbers, speed limits, and points of interest along the route. At other times, she glances at the car’s speed, RPMs, and energy level depicted as bar graphs—no written numerals here either—located on her car’s dashboard. Of course, Kathy always keeps the VIVO’s spoken-graphic interrupt function turned on to alert her of any immediate or impending mechanical failures, traffic problems, or weather emergencies.
And no billboard words in sight! True, there are plenty of roadside billboards, though they aren’t really boards, and no bills are posted on them. They are, in fact, giant VIVO display screens teeming with moving visual ads and corporate logos. If Kathy and Thomas wish, they can access the billboards’ spoken messages through their car’s VIVO, but right now Kathy prefers her VIVO to be quiet while she chats with Thomas about his schoolwork and their visit with Grandma Marie.
As they pull up in front of her mother’s house, Kathy—as usual—reminds Thomas not to speak too quickly when he talks to Grandma Marie. What Kathy considers speed-speaking is becoming Thomas’ ordinary speaking style, and Kathy isn’t too happy about it. Thomas assures Kathy that he’ll try to, in his words, “keep my voice-out” slow enough for Grandma to understand. They ring the doorbell, walk in, and find Grandma Marie sitting at the kitchen table reading a novel and sipping coffee.
Grandma Marie learned to read as a child in school in the 1980s and got hooked on it. After college, she taught Spanish to high schoolers for twenty-five years but took early retirement when her school district—deciding that VIVOs had made foreign-language study unnecessary—dropped her courses from the curriculum. Afterward, Grandma Marie free-lanced as an aloud-reader, transferring difficult-to-scan pre-21st Century manuscripts onto VIVO networks. But she eventually lost that job, too, to advancing technology when even the most difficult hand-written materials were able to be electronically scanned onto VIVO networks, and the last generation of aloud-readers was laid off.
Reading, along with long-distance running, has continued as Grandma Marie’s favorite pastime, but she has been having a harder and harder time finding books to read. Every couple of months, she orders more books through her online Antiques Shopping Network, but she can barely afford her beloved books anymore as they’ve become rarer and their prices have escalated.
Grandma Marie fills three bowls with hot soup and, as always, asks Thomas how his classes are coming along. As Thomas, taking care to speak slowly, describes his classes, Grandma Marie looks at Kathy and exclaims, “Einstein? In the fifth grade? For four-year-olds?” As they eat, Grandma Marie recalls how home schooling and distance-learning by computer were just starting to become popular in the 1980s and 1990s—too late to affect her own education. “Just lucky, I guess,” she jokes.
Grandma Marie notices Thomas looking at the words on the pages of her open novel, and she bites her tongue. She has strong feelings about the fact that her grandchildren can’t read or write, but, after numerous heated conversations with Kathy urging her to introduce the children to reading and writing, Grandma Marie has decided to let the issue drop—at least for now.
After lunch, Kathy and Thomas say goodbye to Grandma Marie. Kathy drops Thomas off at the swimming pool and goes home for a bicycle ride around her neighborhood.
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Mary Beth has always loved nature and natural things, which is why she took her old-style acoustic hand drum to the park. She describes how she jammed for hours with her friends, some of them playing acoustic instruments while others, wearing electrode-filled headbands, made music by mind-playing their thoughts and feelings.
Dinner is followed by the usual ten minutes of clean-up chores around the apartment: putting dinner dishes and soiled clothes into their respective ultrasound machines, telling the robot vacuum units to clean the floors and carpets, voice-activating the self-cleaning mechanisms on the showers, toilets, and sinks in the bathrooms, and putting away the piles of clutter. Then Mary Beth heads to her desk VIVO for an evening of college classes, while Thomas and TaShawn play games on Thomas’ VIVO.
Kathy spends the last few hours before bedtime in front of her bedroom VIVO’s display monitor, first logging onto the Daily Post Access to see what visuals the Daily’s visuals editor selected to accompany the “op-ed column” she inputted that morning, then catching the world news and talking to a couple of friends. Finally, she adjusts her VIVO’s voice-out speed to a higher WPM (words per minute) setting, turns off the monitor, and spends the last half-hour of her day lying on her bed, eyes closed, listening to a complete longstory—they were called “novels” back in the 20th Century when people still wrote and read them—on one of the many longstory networks.
OK, there you have it. A day in the life of an oral-culture family. It’s also a utopian fantasy about a privileged middle-class family living at a time of relative peace and security in an electronically-developed capitalist society in the year 2050.
Based on what our world is like today at the start of the 21st Century, is such a mid-21st Century scenario even remotely possible? Might there really be places on Earth like this place where Kathy, Mary Beth, and Thomas live—communities where life is this pleasant, this free of war, poverty, violence, crime, hate, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, abuse, disease, and environmental destruction? I doubt it.
But I do think that this one-day slice of Kathy’s family’s life will prove to be accurate in one respect: in the year 2050, in the electronically-developed countries, no one—except perhaps Grandma Marie, a declining number of her fellow book hobbyists, and a handful of linguists, historians, academic “literacists,” and archeologists—will be writing or reading. They won’t need to—which is why writing and reading are headed toward extinction. To the extent that VIVO technology is now, at the beginning of the 21st Century, rapidly being developed and is almost in place, writing and reading are already technologically obsolete and will soon be functionally obsolete.
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