and Abigail Woodward. And thanks to the many students, conference participants, and others who discussed this book’s ideas with me over the years.
Table of Contents
No Words on Their Cereal Box: A Day in the Life of a 21st Century Oral-Culture Family
The End of Writing, Reading, and Written Language/Text
1. Last Writes: Previewing the Reasons Why Written Language/Text Will Become Obsolete by 2050
3. (Ear)Wax Makes History: The Technological Reasons for an Oral Culture by 2050-[2]
4. Recovering from Scriptitis: The Evolutionary Reasons for an Oral Culture by 2050
5. VIVOlutionary Learning: Next Step in Re/Storing Education and Human Consciousness
6. Just Thinking Out Loud: Searching for Information Using Sound and Image but No Text
7. Written Numerals, Your Number’s Up! And VIVO’s Got Your Number!
8. How I Un(w)rote the Notes: Retooling the Arts to Fit an Oral Culture
10. Growing Oral Cultures in the VIVO Lab: Examining the Prospects for a Worldwide Oral Culture
Frequently Asked Questions with Answers
Introduction
Caution, readers! Enter and explore VIVO [Voice-In/Voice-Out]’s wild terrain of ideas at your own risk. As one who has crossed and recrossed this book’s landscape and has survived to tell about it, let me offer up a brief perspective and a couple of tips for a successful journey.
Several books published since 1990 have tried to predict how computers will affect literacy. Some see the proliferation of people using the Internet and writing e-mail, together with the growing number of school computer writing labs and online book sales, as proof that literacy will thrive. Others see computers’ irresistible interactive visual displays and sound as submerging text and prompting literacy’s decline, which they view as a tragic loss.
VIVO [Voice-In/Voice-Out] is the first book to take a positive look at how talking computers, VIVOs, will make text/written language obsolete, replace all writing and reading with speech and graphics, democratize information flow worldwide, and recreate an oral culture by 2050.
As readers, you will tour that oral culture and observe how VIVOs will change the ways we’ll do almost everything—and even who we’ll be, our human consciousness. Along the way, you’ll get a taste of the new oral-aural-visual processing skills we’ll need to survive in the fast-approaching post-script world.
Central to the book’s reaching these objectives is its identification and analysis of the four “engines” that are working together to replace written language/text with VIVOs in the electronically-developed countries. Like four horses pulling a coach, these “engines” are continuously pulling, pushing, and supporting each other and, by doing so, are propelling an unstoppable historical trend.
The “engines”:
(1) Evolutionarily, our biology and psychology forever direct us to seek speech-based methods for storing, retrieving, and communicating information.
(2) Technologically, we are driven to develop technologies that enable us to access information by speaking and listening. In addition, we tend to replace older technologies with newer ones that will do the same job more quickly, efficiently, and universally. Written language/text is a technology—an ancient technology whose basic job is to store and retrieve information. Once we understand and accept this idea, we will probably be more open to the idea that written language, like all technologies, can be replaced.
In fact, since the late 1800s, we have been rapidly introducing replacements for written language in the form of radio, phonograph/stereo, film, video, telephone, computers, and other non-text technologies that allow us to use speaking, listening and looking at graphics to access information. In the 21st Century, VIVOs will complete the replacement process.
(3) Young people in the electronically-developed countries are irreversibly rejecting text as their technology of choice for accessing information, and are replacing it with speech-based and non-text visual technologies. They’ve abandoned letter writing in favor of the telephone, and books in favor of TV, movies, CDs, and computer graphics and games. Now that spoken email is available, they will likewise abandon written e-mail. In order to process information using these non-text technologies, young people are developing, albeit unsystematically, the very VIVOlutionary skills they’ll need in order to function in the oral culture that they’re creating.
(4) Eighty percent of adults worldwide are functionally nonliterate. In the 21st Century, these billions of people will require text-free computer technology that will allow them to store and retrieve information—a huge, potential market that will continue to drive VIVO research and development.
