VIVO Voice-In / Voice-Out. William Crossman

out one of these basic survival activities a culture-based essential of that society.

      Take shelter and/or clothing, for example. The primary way this basic survival activity is exemplified in the industrialized countries is that most of us —with the exception of some homeless and/or very poor people—live within some kinds of structures or buildings and wear clothes that cover most of our bodies and protect the soles of our feet. There are other societies that do not shelter and/or clothe themselves in these ways.

      For most people in industrialized countries, then, living in buildings and wearing clothes and footwear are culture-based essentials. This may change with global warming, new technological advances, new attitudes towards nudity, and so on, but for now, buildings and clothes are essential to us. The categories of basic survival activities don’t change over time; the culture-based essentials of a society are always changing.

      Now, let’s put these tools to work. Some people I’ve talked to about the thesis of this book get very upset. Writing/reading, they say, is here to stay. VIVO computers will not replace text in print-literate cultures because text has become basic to our survival as a species. We depend so much on written language to communicate, that giving it up is an unthinkable option.

      I think they’re wrong. They’re confusing writing/reading as a basic human survival activity—which it isn’t, and has never been—with writing/reading as a culture-based essential of a handful of societies around the world—which it has been for centuries but won’t be for much longer.

      Information storage and retrieval, not writing and reading, is the basic survival activity. Writing and reading has just been the primary way—the culture-based essential method by which—we’ve stored and retrieved information in the print-literate countries. This doesn’t mean that most people in these countries are functionally literate. It means that it has been via the written