VIVO Voice-In / Voice-Out. William Crossman

a threat to our survival. Now, we in the print-literate nations are instinctively reacting to the fact that written language—our stored-information accessor of choice—has hit its limits and is failing us.

      It is failing us, first, because it is no longer able to do the tasks we created it to do and, second, because too many people are unable to use it. An example of the first: for most literate people, communicating, storing, and retrieving information by writing and reading is still far slower and more tedious than doing it by speaking.

      Regarding the second, it’s sufficient to remind ourselves that the great majority of the world’s people, by conservative estimates 80% of humanity, including many living in the so-called print-literate nations, still can’t use written language effectively. Most societies in the world today are still oral cultures, and very few of the world’s societies possess either the enormous human and economic resources and/or the political will required to fully train their populations to write and read.

      There are two other reasons—also related to evolution and natural selection—that we’re leaving written language behind. Both are tied to the fact that we have been carrying out the historical commitment that we, in the print-literate societies, originally made to written language. In doing so, however, we have—largely unaware of our dangerous path—strayed too far away from our innate information-communication-storage-retrieval method: speech. Our genes, nervous systems, muscles, and emotions have been sending us a crisis wake-up call, reminding us of our spoken-language survival mandate and telling us to return to our oral-aural roots, or else.

      Or else what? Or else the speech-deficiency based physical and mental illnesses that began to strike the print-literate nations in the 19th Century will continue to spread unchecked. Similar in many ways to the older and better understood sun-, motion-, sleep-, and vitamin-deficiency illnesses, speech-deficiency illnesses grew into a late-20th Century epidemic that continues to thrive in many workplaces and homes today.

      In other words, we literate folks read and write too much and don’t talk enough, and that lack of talk is making us unhealthy. Think hours every day silently writing and reading text on computer screens and on paper.

      Another “or else”: we print-literates, because of the very activity of our having learned to read and write, have lost that vital unified human consciousness possessed by young children and citizens of oral cultures. Our sense organs have lost their natural ability to work together with each other and with our brains and central nervous systems. As a result, we aren’t able to perceive and think accurately about the dynamic reality around us. When we perform actions based on our perceptions and thoughts, it’s no surprise that we’re often way off the mark.

      To be specific, as we learn to read and write, one sense-perceptual activity, the visual, gets separated out from our innate, unified mental-neural-sensory network and gets trained on a non-dynamic reality, text. This leaves us literates with a fractured consciousness, lacking what ancient philosophers referred to as genuine “common sense.”

      As a result, we struggle impossibly to “make sense” of our universe and our lives. VIVOs, by propelling us forward into oral culture, will help to reintegrate our visuality with our other sense organs and mental-neural apparatuses, thereby restoring our consciousnesses and radically reconfiguring the ways we perceive and think about—and act upon—everything.

      Since the late-1800s, we in the print-literate nations have been acting swiftly and positively—though mainly unconsciously—to deal with these crises. We’ve been heeding the evolutionary mandate of our human physiology and psychology to reverse the widening gap between our present print-oriented selves and our innate, biogenetic, oral-aural selves.

      It seems clear to me that the steps we have been taking to stem our speech-deficiency epidemic and to heal our fractured consciousnesses include phasing in speech-based and graphics-based devices, including today’s digital voice-recognition technology, while phasing out writing and reading entirely. How else to explain our desperate embrace of the telephone, phonograph, radio, TV, and computer sound and graphics.

      On some unconscious mental level, we now seem to understand or believe that talking computers, too, will help us to achieve the wellness and wholeness we seek. We seem to unconsciously understand that hooking ourselves up to these talking-computer I.V. units—IntraVIVOs?—will rid us of textual toxicity and pump us full of lifesaving orality. I am overdramatizing again, but only a bit.

      Located at the far end of the written-language bridge, the Second Golden Age of oral culture has been visible to us since the 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