we ourselves are creating and setting in motion for this very purpose—into an age of oral-aural communication and information storage and retrieval.
Why do I think there’s an oral culture in our future? Look at the clues in our present.
• Billions of people are nonliterate or functionally nonliterate and, therefore, cannot use ordinary text-driven computers—even if they could get hold of them. There is a growing worldwide need and demand for computers that can speak and be spoken to, and there is a computer industry eager to supply that demand.
• Most of the world’s nations do not have the enormous resources and/or motivation required to make their populations truly literate.
• For decades, among young people in the industrialized, electronically-developed countries, the amount of writing and reading has declined overall, and young people’s literacy skills have either declined or remained extremely low.
• Most young people prefer communicating, storing, and retrieving information orally-aurally and non-text visually, using the full range of electronic devices, from telephones to computers, already available.
• The technology for building effective VIVO computers is almost in place. Research and development of speech recognition, speech synthesis, and speech understanding is soaring as more and more government, corporate, and university research facilities throw their resources into the creation of VIVOs.
• The voice-recognition technology that allows simultaneous translation of spoken languages from one language to another is in place. And the software that translates speech into on-screen 3-D sign language is here.
• McDonald’s golden arches, Nike’s swoosh, and the hundreds of other traffic, travel, medical, commercial, and informational symbols and icons, understandable to billions of people internationally, are rapidly replacing written words.
• Computer software symbols and icons have become recognizable to today’s computer users: Microsoft “Word’s” W, Apple’s
• Some watches and clocks with “faces” and “hands” no longer have numerals or timekeeping marks of any kind written on them.
• New voice-activated and voice-controlled electronic devices and appliances, including home and car security systems, home heating and cooling systems, coffee makers, alarm clocks, VCR and DVD players, phone message machines, electronic pocket-sized organizers and datebooks, and phone calling-cards are flowing into the marketplace. They’re being joined by:
• The flood of new electronic devices and appliances that can speak back to us.
• The zooming number of magazines, newspapers, and books available on audiocassettes, on CDs, and digitally online using voice-recognition technology.
• The new mobile/wireless digital telephony, voice portals, VoiceXML (Voice eXtensible Markup Language)—the vocal equivalent of HTML (HyperText Markup Language)—and phone-casting, modeled on TV-radio broadcasting, a media network of Internet audio channels available to any telephone.
• WAP (wireless application protocol) allows users to browse the World Wide Web by speaking into cellular phones and other mobile devices. Faster radio-driven applications already threaten to replace WAP.
• Voice-controlled “infotainment” systems in cars and trucks with links to the Internet.
• Singer/entertainer Prince who temporarily replaced his name with a single written glyph, leaving his fans wondering what to call him.
• The tattoos, piercings, scarifications, graffiti tags, and similar graphic symbols that many people in electronically-developed countries are displaying as expressions of their identities.
• The counterpersons at fast-food restaurants who take orders by punching keys bearing pictures of, rather than the words for, Big Macs, large fries, and medium Cokes.
• The restaurant waitpersons who use handheld computers to punch in coded symbols indicating customers’ orders to the chefs and bartenders. Their computers also calculate the bill—and the tip.
• The POS (point of sale) computers that are beginning to replace supermarket checkers.
• The huge worldwide popularity of rap and hip-hop, and the growing audiences for other types of spoken-word and performance poetry.
• Electronic books: a mere step away from electronic talking “books.”
• Voice-driven e-mail has arrived and has started to replace written e-mail. Finally, chat rooms where people really chat.
• The electronic dog and cat doors that open by being activated only by a particular animal’s voice. And the electronic people doors at offices and elevators that open only to a particular human’s voice. Voiceprints: we are what we speak.
To paraphrase a line from Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: you don’t need a weather man to know which way readin’ ‘n’ writin’s blowin’.
PART I
The End of Writing, Reading, and Written Language/Text
CHAPTER 1
Last Writes: Previewing the Reasons Why Written Language/Text Will Become Obsolete by 2050
The 20th Century is behind us, the new millennium has arrived, and, in the electronically-developed countries:
• most people would rather talk to someone on the telephone than write to them;
• most people would rather watch TV than read a book;
• most schools are experiencing a decline in student literacy skills—a true literacy crisis—with little hope for a breakthrough.
Why is all this happening now? Superficial explanations—such as blaming it on TV, on people’s mental laziness or backwardness, or on the schools—simply won’t do. Something much deeper, and more difficult to see, is going on.
The growing feelings of alienation from writing and reading, which school children and people of all ages are experiencing and expressing through their day-to-day behavior, are signs and symptoms of a profound historical, social, technological, and evolutionary change. They are symptomatic of a massive shift that is taking place: away from the use of written language and back to the use of spoken language to communicate, store, and retrieve information in our daily lives.
In the electronically-developed countries, we’re witnessing nothing less than the abandonment of reading and writing, of written language/text itself, and, in its place, the recreation of oral culture. The push to develop voice-recognition technology and VIVOs—voice-in/voice-out computers that we can talk to and that can talk back to us—is part of this evolutionary leap.
It truly is evolutionary. Historically, before our human ancestors developed written language, they accessed stored information orally-aurally, by speaking and listening—as well as by seeing, smelling, tasting, and touching. They relied on their memories to store information that they heard—as well as saw, smelled, tasted, and touched—and they retrieved it for others by speaking and acting.
Six thousand to ten thousand years ago, people’s memories were no longer efficient and reliable enough to store and retrieve the influx of new information that arose with the onset of the agricultural revolution. To transcend their memories’