Subject: Futures of Literacy? (Futurist; Mar-Apr 07)

For those who dont have time or interest to read them, what follows is my summary of the collection of seven articles on this topic in this issue. I boiled eight pages down to about two. Opinions range from the end of the written word would mean the end of civ as we know it to our great grandchildren won't know how to read and write and it won't matter. Please feel free to contact me if you have any comments or questions.


1. John Naisbitt--well-known author of Megatrends (1982) and similar books--has a mixed view. He notes the 6000 yr history of the written word, the declining rate of newspaper and book reading, and the ongoing increase in usage of TV, Inet (esp My Space, You Tube), video games--he claims americans now spend more on video games than movies--Ipods etc.

Like most, he worries about the negative near-term socioecon impacts of decline in "literacy" as traditionally/currently defined (NEA considers this a national crisis, and decline in literacy not good for a free, productive, innovative society), but also notes the potential democratizing effect of visual communication (anyone can now make and "broadcast" their own photos and video programming).

Like many, JN thinks maintaining future competitive edge will require edu in tech AND the arts. He then simply concludes that the written word will not go away. However, he expects the recession of the written word--and the increase in visual communication--to continue to accelerate, so we will all have to learn this new "language."


2. Joe Lambert--director of the Center for Digital Storytelling in the UK--is bullish about the potential of digital media to help preserve cultures. While a strong proponent of visual literacy, he thinks the inherent values of "textual communication" will become stronger by contrast, just as oral recitation and musical literacy became stronger with the spread of the written word.

His center uses visual culture to bring people back to the written word. JL states that many educators see this approach as critical tool for increasing quality of writing.

He thinks "the screen" is a "natural" place for people to go because visual communication still requires dialogue and narration, and that collaboration in creating narratives becomes more interesting with the ubiquity of online networks.


3. Michael Rogers--the NYTimes new futurist in residence--has used a fictional future editorial from the yr 2025 to stimulate thought and comment from readers about the futures of literacy. The future "facts" he posited in 2025: most info available in multimedia form, and when text required, computers can take dictation perfectly and read aloud. Only leaders and long-term planners really need to know how to read and write "long-form" text. The rest of society only needs to read labels, signs, text msgs, and short emails. In 2025, it is considered a waste of time and resources to teach long-form reading to most.

Rogers received hundreds of emails calling him an idiot, moron, and worse. He was encouraged that so many readers ardently defended reading, but dismayed that so many did not get that his "editorial" was fictional. He now wonders if this experiment revealed the true nature of future reading--which may consist only of text msgs, emails, and magazines with no text other than photo captions. He concludes reading will survive, but reading skills may inevitably decline.


4. William Crossman--author of Voice In/Voice Out (VIVO); the Coming Age of Talking Computers (2004), and founder of CompSpeak 2050 Institute for the Study of Talking Computers and Oral Cultures--thinks that by 2050 VIVO (talking computers incorporating multisensory, multimodal technologies) will make the written word obsolete, re-creating a global oral culture. WC is very optimistic that writing can and will be replaced by newer technologies that do the same job more effectively, cost-efficiently, and universally.

He thinks talking computers as well as speech, graphics, and video streaming over the internet will replace text-driven computers and written texts (no more keyboards!). Even the functionally non-literate and the disabled will have access to all info without learning to read and write simply by speaking, looking, listening, or signing. VIVO will also make instantaneous language translation possible, so "foreign" language barriers will melt away.

Crossman also thinks humans are genetically/evolutionarily hardwired to access info by speaking, listening, and using our other senses. We start doing this at age 1 or 2, well before we start writing. The pro-VIVO orientation of the young will also change education. The school literacy "crisis" could be reversed through the adoption of a VIVO curriculum. The "three Rs" will be replaced by the "four Cs"--critical thinking, creativity, computer skills, and calculators. Our great-great-grandchildren wont know how to read and it wont matter. They will be as skillfully "literate" in info tech of their generation as we are in ours.


5. Edward Luttwak--senior fellow at Center for Strategic and Intl Studies, and former consultant for US Depts of Defense and State--examined the possible strategic foreign policy implications of the "post-literate" era. EL fears that "pictures contain very little data, and are systematically misleading even if not edited"--"nothing lies like a picture"--and that TV is a "dis-educating" force.

He asserts you can watch TV news coverage of a war and still learn nothing about the conflict other than it makes children cry, that structures and other property are destroyed, soldiers and civilians are injured or killed, etc. Pictures are NOT worth a thousand words in the sense that they cannot convey info about the causes, costs, possible, probable, and certain costs of "stopping that war prematurely"--which I suspect is a veiled ref to Iraq.

But he adds that "imagery does not provide enough data to formulate reasoned views on how to stop a conflict and prevent its renewal. In that sense, he thinks TV is an info 'black hole'." Luttwak concludes by asserting our civilization will be "doomed" by the rise of the image and the death of the written word.


6. Peter Wagschal--author of "Illiterates with Doctorates: The Future of Education in an Electronic Age" (Futurist; 1978)--claims much of what he forecast almost 30 years ago has come true (although he also paraphrases Mark Twain by admitting "the news of print's demise was highly exaggerated"). He thinks the pace at which digital media have replaced paper over the past three decades is "mind-boggling", and that we are not far from the future he described back in 1978: "electronic media will make everything there is to know universally accessible to all globally." He also tried to debunk the notion that people who cannot read and write are stupid (he says Socrates never wrote a word?), and point out the drawbacks of written communication (e.g. much traditional writing done in isolation, in contrast to explosion of interactive list serves, chat groups, and blogs).

Will these techs ever make it possible to be an educated illiterate? He thinks so, but thinks pinpointing a date is still difficult. But he agrees with the author of VIVO above (keyboards will be obsolete, digital devices will translate speech into written word and translate foreign languages, etc.). He also cites the phenomenal growth of My Space, You Tube, and ITunes, and hopes "our schools will eventually emerge from the 19th century." He concludes by quoting now mainstream consensus? thinking from the director of the National Center on Education and the Economy (paraphrased by me): "...comfort with ideas and abstractions will be key to good jobs...creativity and innovation will be key to a good life...and ability to learn how to learn will be the only security you have."

(BTW, I think and hope this will not be completely true--esp his future concept of "security"--due to increased and broadened ownership of income-producing assets combined with completely new and reinvented techs that can cost-effectively increase self-reliance in increasingly decentralized ways.)

7. Christine Rosen--author of My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of Devine Girlhood, fellow at Ethics and Public Policy Center in DC, and senior editor for A Journal of Technology and Society--thinks the power to control and manipulate images is democratizing, but it may also undermine trust. She points out how most of us are now usually bombarded with thousands of images per day. But they may have--by their sheer number and ease of replication--become less magical or shocking, a situation unknown until recent human history. Before mass reproduction, images had more power and could evoke more fear. Political and religious leaders have long feared images and some have taken extreme measures to control and manipulate them (she cites Henry VIII, Stalin, and the Taliban as examples).

Today, anyone can produce and alter images (via digital cameras, video camcorders, Photoshop, and Powerpoint, etc., and then distribute via inet). She argues this has diluted the power of images by democratizing ability to produce and disseminate images, while simultaneously strengthening the power of images by fueling the decline of the written word. Historians have examined the human transition from oral to written and then printing cultures, but Rosen thinks it remains to be seen where the current resurgence of images and oral culture will take us.

Will this open up new vistas for understanding and expression that are "better than print?" Or are we making a peculiar and unwelcome return to some--albiet more sophisticated and high-tech--form of pre-literacy? Rosen thinks technology is undermining our ability to "trust" what we see (i.e. its accuracy/veracity), and fears we will prefer appearance to reality and the discipline and patience that "true" things often require to understand and describe. In the process, our ability to communicate may be stunted, and our desire to transmit culture to future generations may be seriously compromised.


"Facts on Literacy" sidebar:

- About 10% of US adults have difficulty with "common" literacy tasks such as completing forms or finding info in a text. Almost one-quarter of US adults read at the lowest literacy level. (Natl Center for Edu Stats)

- Globally, approximately 861 million adults were illiterate in 2002 (out of global pop of over 6 billion?--861 mill seems low to me). About 70% live in nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South and East Asia, incl. India, China, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. (UNESCO, 2005)

- In 2001 US manufacturers poll, employers ranked poor reading skills as the second most serious problem among hourly workers, behind only attendance, attitude, and punctuality problems. (NAM)

- Between 1982 and 2002, young adults between 18 and 24 went from being one of the most likely groups to read to one of the least. (NEA survey of literary reading)

- In 2005, 11% of incoming college freshmen required remedial reading--the leading predictor of college drop outs--and 14% required remedial writing (Alliance for Excellent Education; 2006)





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