In the Future We Will All Live in Star Wars
“The thing you’re doing now, reading prose on a screen, is going out of fashion. … The defining narrative of our online moment concerns the decline of text, and the exploding reach and power of audio and video.”¹
Shhhhh.
Welcome to the p̵o̵s̵t̵-̵t̵e̵x̵t̵ ̵f̵u̵t̵u̵r̵e̵ Star Wars galaxy, a highly functional post-literate society where we transfer information more fully and effectively via dynamic multimedia than static text, learn new things more easily and quickly from verbal and tonal memories like Luke’s Jedi tutelage, review and search archives in holographic video recordings, and converse with people who speak different languages in real time with the help of increasingly smarter protocol droids.
We’ve only begun to glimpse the deeper, more kinetic possibilities of a post-literate culture in which the printed word recedes to the background and sounds and images become the universal language and a more efficient and effective means of communication. In this regard, post-literacy isn’t a societal ill of contemporary culture, but a future state in which communication returns to a more natural form of multisensory experience that may even more fully convey information, emotion, and persuasion.
Ancient cultures revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation, and rhetoric instilled in oral societies a reverence for the past, the mystical, the ornate, and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, oral traditions were overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s metal movable type in 1450 elevated writing to a dominant position in society. By means of cheap and perfect copies, printed text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. Print reigned supreme primarily because “it is a pictorial statement that can be repeated precisely and indefinitely.”² From printing came literature, journalism, science, and laws. Printing instilled in society a reverence for precision, an appreciation of linear logic, a pursuit of objectivity, a culture of expertise, and an allegiance to authority whose truth was as fixed and final as a book.
The machinery of mass reproduction unleashed the immense cultural power of written texts and gave birth to the greatest flowering of human achievement the world has ever seen. Print literacy became the heartbeat of Western culture, as well as a fundamental requirement for participation in the intellectual, social and economic enterprises. If you wanted to get ahead, you must learn to read and write. The intelligentsia, comprised of artists, teachers, academics, writers, journalists, and the literary hommes de lettres, arose as a status class around the globe, and high levels of literacy became a pre-requisite for a country’s economic success.
On the contrary, orality nearly disappeared because it was an inferior medium to print in terms of information accuracy, archival, and distribution — until new technologies have turned communication on its head. The invention of the record player made it possible to record and preserve sounds for timeless retrieval and playback. In Beethoven’s day, few people ever heard one of his symphonies more than once, but with the advent of cheap audio recordings, a dabbawala in Mumbai could listen to them all day long. Then came the radio, which allowed the mass distribution of sounds to a geographically dispersed audience. Then we started giving machines ears and mouths. Today one out of every two people on this planet has a computer in their pocket that not only can decipher voices and answer back, but simultaneously has instant access to most of humanity’s accumulated knowledge.
Now it’s often easier to communicate and learn through images and sounds than through text. An increasing number of A-list authors are already bypassing print and releasing audiobook originals, and audiobooks can be a far more immersive and compelling medium for conveying facts and emotions. “If written language is merely a technology for transferring information, then it can and should be replaced by a newer technology that performs the same function more fully and effectively,’” writes Patrick Tucker. “But it’s up to us, as the consumers and producers of technology, to insist that the would-be replacement demonstrate authentic superiority.”³
Learning to read and write is very hard. It takes years and years of constant practice to train our brains to seamlessly convert a visual pattern of shapes into an internal auditory stream of speech that we can understand. If you don’t recall how hard it was to learn to read, just ask a child in elementary school. Clearly our brains were not designed for this type of task — it is only though force of will that we coerce ourselves to do it.
Teaching reading and writing is just as difficult. A whole class of citizens dedicated to accomplishing the Herculean task has emerged. The United States, for example, publicly funds an army of 3.6 million people whose full-time duty is to teach childeren to be literate members of society.⁴ Each one of these teachers has themselves had years of specialized training just to learn how best to teach these skills. They are even required to be licensed like doctors and lawyers.
Compare this to speaking and listening — tasks that our brains are evidently well-suited for. If the human brain were software, auditory verbal creation and comprehension would be built-in features which we get for free with no overhead. When we think to ourselves “I want to take a walk,” we do it instinctively by talking and listening to a verbalized inner monologue instead of creating a visualization of the letters “I-W-A-N-T-T-O-…” on an internal screen.
When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force.
I speak, therefore I am. Vocal learners, like parrots and humans, are perhaps the only ones who fully comprehend the truth of this.
- Ted Chiang, The Great Silence
Almost all children learn to talk and listen without any conscious effort. Almost all parents are competent at teaching auditory fluency without any pedagogical training. This raises the question: Why do we spend so much time, money and effort on learning, teaching, promoting and testing print literacy if it’s so hard and we humans are so innately terrible at it? Is there a better way to become literate — beyond the printed word?
The literate world of Western Europe displaced and changed the oral cultures it encountered. So too will the post-literate world displace and transform literate societies. French bibliophile Octave Uzanne predicted in 1894 “the end of books,” and a future where phonographs would soon become cheap and small enough that people would switch from reading books to listening to them, even while walking.
If by books you are to be understood as referring to our innumerable collections of paper, printed, sewed, and bound in a cover announcing the title of the work, I own to you frankly that I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg’s invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude as a means of current interpretation of our mental products. Printing is…threatened with death by the various devices for registering sound which have lately been invented, and which little by little will go on to perfection.⁵
That prediction is upon us. We are already in the realm of the Fahrenheit 451 society where the traditional shell of the book is vanishing. While many people drown themselves in the void of mindless TV programs and social media in order to avoid thinking and living, new technologies also provide new tools and opportunities for education. Learning is no longer confined to a sheaf of pages with a spine you can grab, and the conceptual structure of a book — a bunch of symbols and ideas united by a theme into an experience that takes a while to complete — remains and may even be more enlivened than ever by technologies. There’s no better time to learn than now.
On average, an audiobook goes by at 150–160 words per minute (wpm), and the average person reads words on a page at about 300 wpm. But many people listen to audiobooks at a faster speed, getting through the book in less time than actually reading the paper sheets. Not only is audiobook production constantly improving, but developments in technology have made audiobooks extremely convenient for the consumer. Unsurpringly, audiobook sales have grown exponentially while print book and ebook sales have declined.
Anyone who has tried the latest speech recognition software knows that we have already passed the milestone where the vast majority of people find speaking to be more accurate and more efficient than writing or typing. This trend will continue and accelerate. It’s likely that typing will soon be as useful a skill as cursive penmanship (which is still being taught to school children!).
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ~ Alvin Toffler
In the last three decades, the technological convergence between communication and computation has spread, sped up, blossmed, and evolved. Constant flux means everything is in the process of becoming, churning from “might” to “is.” We are moving away from the world of fixed nouns and towards a world of fluid verbs, and products are becoming services and processes. Embedded with high doses of technology, an audiobook might be an interactive experience, a contiously updated sequence of materials rapidly adapting to user feedback, competition, innovation, etc.; it might be a cultural platform packed with flexibility, customization, upgrades, connections, and new features.
An audiobook might automatically explain words and concepts you don’t know, slow down when it senses that you are having trouble keeping up, and skip sections that you already know. A good audiobook experience will evolve to become a deep yet effortless conversation with an expert rather than passive consumtion. A book is no longer a finished product, but an endless process of reimagining your experience that morphs as you “read” or listen. “Booking” becomes a service rather than a noun, as liquid and open-ended as a Wikipedia page.
Technologies might soon enable us to search and index much of the world’s repository of audio content, giving sounds a power that has kept text dominant in cultural life for so long. Interactive wearable audiobooks might even help the deaf hear stories.
Maybe it’s time that we liberate literacy from paper and expand it far and beyond. The future requires “polymodal literacy,” a combination of visual, interactive, computational, and textual literacies.
“Literacy” can encompasses multiple communication technologies. It includes legacy media like written text and visual communication. But it now extends to computational and interactive literacy. Using digital technologies like the Web requires familiarity with interactive models, while understanding how those technologies operate requires familiarity with computational processes and structures. — postliteracy.org
In 2050, will we have any need for print literacy? Will someone who conquers reading and writing be better off than someone who doesn’t but can actively listen and speak with purpose and clarity? More importantly, will a master of print literacy be better off than their equivalent selves had they allocated their time and brain cells differently? What else could children achieve if they could dedicate an extra 3,600 hours of learning time to visual-spacial tasks such as contemplating Banach spaces, quantum retrocausality, or Mersenne primes? And what new abilities might we make room for in their open and plastic minds if we stopped drafting billions of neurons into service as ill-performing text-to-speech engines?
In the future, we will all live in Star Wars.
¹ Manjoo, Farhad. “Welcome to the Post-Text Future.” The New York Times. February 9, 2018.
² McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994.
³ Tucker, Patrick. “The Dawn of the Postliterate Age.” The Futurist 43 (6): 41–5. 2009.
⁴ According to the National Center for Education Statistic, a projected 3.6 million full‐time‐equivalent (FTE) elementary and secondary school teachers were engaged in classroom instruction in fall 2017.
⁵ Uzanne, Octave. “The End of Books.” Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. 16 (July-December 1894), 221–231.
