VIVO Voice-In / Voice-Out. William Crossman

this book, I say some negative-sounding things about writing and reading. For example, I say that they are about to become obsolete. This isn’t intended as an attack on written language. It’s merely an observation, part of a broader analysis presented here. And it’s definitely not intended as an attack on, or a demeaning of, people worldwide who are striving to learn to write and read.

      I have the greatest respect and admiration for children and adults around the world who are trying to achieve literacy. Today, a person’s ability to write and read still raises for them new possibilities of communication, knowledge, social and political involvement, employment, enjoyment, self-esteem, creative expression, and much more.

      The analysis presented here, rather than closing the doors of hope on those who lack and/or seek the literacy-key to information, communication, and knowledge, opens these doors wide for them. It says that the same VIVO-computer technology that will make written language obsolete will also create potential opportunities for the billions of nonliterate and semi-literate people throughout the world to tap into the world’s store of information—without having to learn to read and write at all.

      To all students and all others who wish to read and write, I still say: Go to school! Stay in school! Learn to read and write! We’ll need it in our lifetimes!

      I say this because written language isn’t going to disappear overnight. It will take time: decades, two or three generations, maybe even a whole century. Yet, its eventual disappearance will be the end of a process that’s already well underway.

      It is ironic that, with the 21st Century’s arrival, oral culture is growing in the print-saturated, electronically-developed countries at the exact moment that many electronically-undeveloped countries are earnestly launching literacy campaigns. The near-future course of literacy development in these latter countries is very difficult to predict. However, in the electronically-developed countries today, we need only to look around to confirm that a massive, rapid, electronically-aided decline in the number of writers-readers has begun.

      We’re witnessing the beginning of an earthshaking transformation of human society away from print culture toward oral culture. It will occupy and involve the energies of humankind from the beginning to the end of the 21st Century and will surely reshape every field of human activity and human consciousness itself. By 2050, in the electronically-developed countries, the use of written language, of writing and reading, will mainly be a thing of the past.

      One hundred years beyond, by 2150, all of the world’s communities will again be oral cultures. VIVOs will link all of them—including those we build in space—into a single, oral-aural, information-access network: a true, worldwide oral culture.

      There is a book, yet to be written, titled The Future, that is already out of print.

       CHAPTER 2

       Grammar-Check, Spell-Check, Speak-Check, Listen-Check: The Technological Reasons for an Oral Culture by 2050–[1]

       Musing 1

      Imagine you teach writing/composition to college undergraduates, as I do. And imagine you’ve given a take-home writing assignment to your students. The next class period, you collect the essays, all written on computers, and that night you start to grade them for content, organization of ideas, and language skills (grammar, spelling, punctuation, language use). The first thing you notice—and it’s old hat by now—is that no matter how rough the content and organization of the essays, the language skills are perfect. Of course! Students ran their completed essays through grammar-check and spell-check programs before handing them in.

      One problem facing you at this point, as the person who is supposed to give feedback on these essays and grade them, is that you don’t know whether these students are able to write a grammatically correct sentence. Unless they took the time to compare the essay they first typed into the computer with the essay the computer eventually printed out, they don’t know either. The point here is: does it matter?

      Now imagine it’s Year 2010, and you’re still teaching writing/composition at the same college, and you’ve assigned a similar essay. By now, students will have traded in their keyboard-type, text-driven models for VIVO computers. How will this change things?

      The main difference is that, before, when students entered their essays via text, they had to have some writing skills—they had to be able to write something that was correct enough in grammar, spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary to enable the computer to produce the flawless finished product. They also had to have some reading skills to read their sentences as they wrote them. Using VIVO computers, students don’t have to have any writing or reading skills at all to produce a perfectly “written” essay.

      The student merely speaks into her VIVO computer; her words get organized into complete spoken sentences and paragraphs via her miracle software; non-words, incorrect phrases, and grunts get dropped or replaced with their correct counterparts; spelling and punctuation are irrelevant since the finished product will be oral, not printed; finally, she “proofreads” the outputted “essay” by listening to it and making final corrections. She then emails the e-talk folder to you and, just to be certain you receive it, puts a backup spoken copy onto a diskette which she hands to you the next day.

      But, wait. You had assigned a written essay; the student had misremembered. Easy enough. Her classroom VIVO, like those of her classmates, is programmed with a speech-to-text option. She flips on her VIVO, prints out a copy of her text after running it through grammar-check and spell-check, and presents to you her now correctly completed written assignment. She still hasn’t written or read a single word. Voice-in, voice-out—plus push-a-button print-out.

      How do you grade her writing? Again: does it matter? Does it matter that she may not be able to read or write?

      It matters to you because you’re a writing teacher, you’re committed to teaching students how to write better, and you’re getting paid to do it. You believe it’s still very important for people to learn to write and read, so you’ve decided to change your teaching techniques. From now on, you won’t let your students use their VIVO computers at all for writing assignments. You’ll forbid them to use grammar-check and spell-check. You’ll make them write their essays by hand in class and pass their inky drafts directly to you.

      But why bother? Specifically, why is it important for people to learn to read and write at all if—as your student has proven to you—we already have the technology that has rendered these skills obsolete?

      Let’s look at a parallel in mathematics. I have a ten-year-old friend, Benita Lopez, who hasn’t learned the “times” tables and isn’t going to. From first grade, Benita has been trained to do math on her calculator rather than on her fingers or in her head. She thinks memorizing “times” tables, rather than using her calculator, to figure 8x8 and 9x9 is like counting seconds all day rather than using her watch to tell the time. I agree.

      The watch example contains another parallel. In this age of digital clocks and watches, there are already millions of young people who depend on digital displays to tell time. They can’t tell time by looking at the hands of a clock. Is it important that they learn to read clock faces? I don’t think so. Watches and clocks represent the old technology. Many children of the Digital Age have never even heard the words “hands” and “face” applied to timepieces, and when they do, they laugh unbelievingly.

      Think of it this way: is it important that we, the generation of adults who were brought up using watches with “hands” and “faces,” also be required to learn to read sundials? How many of us have ever used a sundial, or know what the shadow-making pointer in the middle of a sundial is called? Check the bottom of this page for the answer.

      My ten-year-old friend, Benita, isn’t the only one who thinks it’s unnecessary for students to learn the “times” tables and other rules of applied mathematics. Today, students in grade school, high