May 16, 2005
Death of text? Maybe, but it's not back to the past...
Professorial trend spotter predicts end of written word
An article posted via the IT Forum email list describes the death of text. My first thoughts were to agree with two responders on the list that stated that text would not die because it is so much more efficient than speech.
Further thought, however, has led me to think that William Crossman might be correct about the demise of written language but incorrect about the return to an oral-aural culture as we did many years ago. I think it is entirely possible that text as we know it (books, magazines, newspapers) is going to go the way of the dinosaur but trends do not tend to reverse themselves. More likely, we will see a new literacy. A visual-information-conceptual literacy that utilizes a mix of media to convey messages much faster than either written or oral speech can achieve.
Human beings are always looking for the path of least resistance but also looking to gain more knowledge about their environment. With the crush of information becoming an avalanche, it makes sense that we need better media to convey concepts, rather than facts, at a very rapid pace.
In fact, I believe that over the next few generations; gaming literacy, information literacy, and visual literacy might begin to make both text and speech less relevant to our ability to convey and consume information.
Posted by Rovy at May 16, 2005 6:47 PM