invention of the phonograph in 1877. We trekked the bridge toward our destination decade after decade through the 20th Century. By mid-21st Century, we will finally reach the bridge’s end and step off into the future. Once across, we will never look back.
School children’s declining literacy rate is a symptom of these deeper processes. As a group, young people in the electronically-developed countries have chosen oral-aural and non-print visual technologies—video, stereo, radio, film, telephone, and computer—as their preferred methods for accessing “live” and stored information.
These technologies, like written language, are external extensions of our brains’ memory banks and our sense organs—mindparts located outside of our heads. But unlike written language, they allow us to communicate in the way that’s most basic and familiar to us: through spoken language.
Most young people today instinctively understand this rock-bottomness of speech/spoken language. They are in touch with it. They feel it in their bones, their brains, their genes. Why should they read and write, so many young people ask, when they can listen and speak? They view the rules of writing as they view all rules imposed on them by adult society—as devices to dominate and control young people. And they’re rebelling.
Students’ refusal to go along with the program is causing our schools to develop a record of failure, as each twelfth-, eighth-, or third-grade class graduates with a weaker grasp of reading and writing than the same-grade class of the previous year. Writing teachers are feeling discouraged and demoralized, and many have basically given up trying to teach it. The result: a downward spiral of writing-reading skills and stagnating test scores that became the school literacy crisis of the 1990s and that continues today.
By 2050, if large numbers of students will have been able to gain access to talking computers, all this negativity and failure concerning writing and reading will be a distant memory. All education in the electronically-developed countries will be oral-aural and non-text visual. Students will use talking computers with optional monitors displaying icons, graphics, and visuals to freeze and thaw information.
Instead of the “three R’s”—reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic—students will focus on the “four C’s”—critical thinking, creative thinking, compspeak (accessing information using VIVOs), and calculators. I call it VIVOlutionary learning.
We won’t have to wait until 2050. Today, a student assigned to write an essay is able to speak it into voice-recognition software, use their computer’s paragraph-check, grammar-check, and spell-check to organize and correct it, “proofread” it by listening to the computer repeat it back, print it out, and submit it to the teacher for a grade. All done using only today’s infancy-level software. Tomorrow, and in the tomorrows after that, this process will continue to grow faster, simpler, and more accurate.
The student mentioned above will have proven two things today about talking computers tomorrow. First, that any person—nonliterate as well as literate—with a talking computer will be able to produce a perfect written essay. Second, that because any person with a talking computer will be able to produce a perfect written essay, written language will have become obsolete.
Why should the student in the above example bother to print out a copy of the essay? Why should they bother with that final step of translating their spoken ideas into written language? Their teacher certainly doesn’t need a written record of their ideas. Using their own voice-recognition software today—or VIVO tomorrow—the teacher is able to listen to the student’s spoken ideas online and respond accordingly. Neither the student nor the teacher needs to write anything down in order for learning to occur and for education to take place.
In this scenario, the student and teacher are using their voice-recognition software exactly the way it is supposed to be used. Isn’t that why we’re developing VIVOs? Isn’t that what they’re for? Don’t we want students to be able to input their ideas orally online and teachers to be able to access those ideas aurally? Voice-in, voice-out: simple.
We developed written language to store and retrieve information, and we are developing talking computers to perform the very same function. Because talking computers will do it more easily, quickly, efficiently, universally, and (ultimately) cheaply, they will replace written language. Simple.
We used to cut our grass with a scythe; then, we invented the push lawn mower and put the scythe in a museum; then, we invented the gasoline-engine lawn mower and put the push lawn mower in the museum. That’s the way technology works, and the way we work with technology: we are forever replacing the old with the new.
In the case of written language, however, we are replacing a technology (written language) with a non-technology (spoken language), but we are giving the non-technology a new technological twist: an electronic echo, a gigantic memory capable of storing and retrieving an almost unlimited amount of information in the form of speech.
Written language was a technology created by our ancestors to help them deal with a specific set of historical needs and conditions in a specific historical period several thousand years ago. Today, we are creating VIVO technology to answer a different set of needs and conditions in our own historical period. Soon we’ll be placing written language on the museum wall next to the scythe.
Just as some students today might join a choral group, karate club, or chess club as a pleasurable pastime, some mid-21st Century students might join a literacy club to learn written language for fun. But there will be no compelling reason why they would need to learn to read and write and, therefore, no compelling reason why they should have to learn it—or why their schools should have to teach it. Exit the school literacy crisis.
Not only education but also the arts and, possibly, international relations will be transformed in the shift from print to oral culture.
Imagine the literary arts without written language, and the musical arts without written music: a return to storytelling, spoken poetry, and improvised music.
Imagine international relations without written language: dominant nations would no longer be able to force other nations to read, write, and become educated in the former’s “standard” languages—a traditional weapon of cultural domination—and would no longer be able to decide which individuals, in the dominated nations, would be allowed to become literate.
These are just two examples of areas in which VIVOs, or, more accurately, people using VIVOs, will reshape the world in the 21st Century. In this book, I take the viewpoint that good results could possibly come from the fact that talking computers will soon take over written language’s job. Lovers of the written word—and I am one of you—I invite you to give the following ideas a hearing.
The creation of VIVOs will create new potential opportunities for people in three areas.
• VIVOs will create new potential opportunities for the world’s nonliterate and semi-literate people to be able to access—through speech or signing alone—the world’s storehouse of information and knowledge. For the first time since the introduction of written language, people’s nonliteracy or semi-literacy won’t prevent their accessing all stored information.
Pre-VIVO electronic technologies have already actualized similar potential opportunities for millions, maybe billions, of people worldwide. Within a period of about sixty years, a huge amount of information that had been formerly inaccessible, because it had been stored in the form of written language, has become available to people who can’t write or read. Radio, video, stereo, film, telephone, and computer have opened up an oral-aural and/or non-text visual universe of stored information for the non-readers and non-writers who have finally been able to gain access to these technologies.
Sixty
