VIVO Voice-In / Voice-Out. William Crossman

was a feat that required great imagination and complexity of thought and, in today’s terms, involved the creation of: new software—pictographs and alphabets forming written languages; new hardware or the adaptation of old hardware to new tasks—pens, pencils, brushes, knives, chisels, inks, chalk, pigments, animal skins, paper, leaves, wood, stone; and new operations—writing and reading. Using this new technology, our ancestors freed themselves from the limits of human memory. Written language enabled them to freeze and thaw as much information as their hardware allowed.

      Today, we in the electronically-developed countries view writing and reading as one of the necessities of human existence, as something we can’t do without, like water, food, and sleep. This may be the view we see through our culturally-biased, pro-text eyeglasses, but it’s just plain wrong. Not only is written language not necessary to human existence, but we could have reached today’s level of information storage-retrieval without ever having created written language in the first place.

      If some early society had found or carved a wooden, bone, or stone cylinder, coated it with beeswax, attached a porcupine quill to a hollow gourd, let the quill rest on the wax-coated cylinder, and spoken into the gourd while rotating the cylinder, written language might never have happened. Humanity might have gone right from storing and retrieving speech-based information by memory to doing it by phonograph without entering the world of print culture at all. Humanity’s First Golden Age of oral culture might never have ended.

      I’m overdramatizing this point somewhat to help lay the groundwork for a different view of written language. Throughout this book, I characterize written language as a technology, a technological solution to specific information-storage-retrieval problems that people faced at a specific moment in history 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Like most technologies, written language will serve its function until some better technology comes along to replace it. Written language isn’t an eternal verity. We can admire it, but we shouldn’t worship it.

      With written language about to make its exit, and its replacement already stepping through our front door, it is vital that we see written language clearly for what it is: a transitory technology. This reality-check will help us prepare ourselves to say “goodbye” to it and to welcome back its replacement: our old friend, spoken language.

      Unlike written language, spoken language—by which I mean speech itself—wasn’t/isn’t a technology devised by people to overcome human limitations in the face of social and environmental changes. In this sense, spoken language isn’t a technology at all. Though we humans created or devised particular spoken languages, we didn’t create or devise spoken language itself any more than we created our circulatory systems.

      Our ability to speak language is an inborn characteristic of our species. We carry in our genes and our brains the capacity for spoken language. If the day ever arrives that we wave a final “goodbye” to spoken language—and to the sign languages used by people with hearing and/or speaking disabilities—we’ll be waving “goodbye” to the species of human beings that we are.

      In contrast to written language, spoken and sign languages are “user friendly.” As very young children, we just start understanding them and speaking or signing them. We don’t have to spend years in school learning to speak. Nor does spoken language drive a wedge into a particular linguistic community the way written language does—dividing its population into those who can read and write and those who can’t. Everyone who is mentally and physically able can speak a language.

      Historically, spoken language came—and had to come—to humans before written language. Biologically, speech or sign language comes—and has to come—to each child before literacy. This is because written languages are symbolic representations of spoken languages. Had we no spoken language, we could not have created written language. Written language may have emerged as the primary method used to store and retrieve information in certain areas of the world, but it is based on and derived from spoken language.

      In the 21st Century, people with access to VIVO-computer technology will once again be able to use spoken language to access all stored information. Talking computers are going to make writing, reading, spelling, alphabets, punctuation, written numerals, and even note-based music notation obsolete.

      The obituary for written language won’t be written. It will be spoken by someone talking to a VIVO computer in 2050.

      Since the mid-19th Century, humanity has been waging a furious assault against written language. This has taken the form of people inventing and developing devices which use spoken language, rather than written language, to communicate, store, and retrieve information. A cornucopia of speech-based devices now exists which has simplified and sped up—and/or completely redefined—the tasks we formerly assigned to text and text-based devices. For the past 125 years, these speech-based devices have been relentlessly usurping the functions of the text-based devices.

      The letter, the magazine, the newspaper, the broadside, the book, the flyer, the written advertisement, the memo or written message, the file, the written record, the official document, the written school exercise—all have come under attack. In some cases, direct or instantaneous oral-aural communication devices (telephone, telegraph, live radio, live television) have been doing the usurping. In other cases, devices which store information in the form of speech (phonograph, audiocassette, compact disc, “talkie” movie film, videocassette/DVD) have been responsible.

      Since 1990, our minds and resources have turned to the development of talking computers. In our rush to create VIVOs, we’re continuing the process Edison, Morse, Tesla, Bell, and their counterparts began.

      E-mail appears to be an exception to the above: a form of written message whose popularity is surging in the electronically-developed countries. However, today we are already able to send and receive spoken e-mail, and, given this option, I predict that most of us will soon start speaking our messages instead of typing them. Goodbye e-mail; hello e-talk!

      Why have we been so obsessed with researching and developing oral-aural replacements for written language? Because biologically, psychologically, and technologically, we have again hit limits on the efficiency and reliability of our main method for freezing and thawing information.

      Formerly, as I mentioned above, it was the limits of human memory to retain the influx of information during the agricultural revolution that led people to create written language. For the last 125 years, it has been the limits of written language use that have driven people to seek and develop oral-aural replacements. I’ll return to these limits in a moment.

      Even though the scientific sector has been working overtime these past 125 years to develop oral-aural and non-text visual technologies, from the wax-cylinder phonograph to the talking computer, the true nature of this process and its goal—to supersede written language’s limits by returning to oral-aural methods of information communication and storage—has been largely undeclared, unacknowledged, and unconscious, even among the chief developers themselves.

      This book has, as one of its main objectives, to acknowledge this process and to raise it to the level of consciousness and awareness. If we understand what is happening and why, we’ll be better able to evaluate it and direct its course.

      VIVOs will be the last nail in written language’s coffin. By making it possible for us to access stored information orally-aurally, talking computers will finally make it possible for us to replace all written language with spoken language. Once again, we’ll be able to store and retrieve information simply by talking and listening—and by looking, too, but at graphics, not at text. With this giant step forward into the past, we’re about to recreate oral culture on a more efficient and reliable technological foundation.

      From a Darwinian perspective, written language is a 6,000-to-10,000-year-old bridge that humanity has been using to walk from our First Golden Age of oral culture to our Second. We undertook this journey to survive as a species. Six thousand to ten thousand years ago, lacking the ability to store and retrieve by memory the growing sum of survival information, our species faced two options: develop new storage-retrieval technology or self-destruct. That’s when and why we created the written-language bridge.

      As