The Postliterate Future by Jim Pinto

The history of civilization is a history of communication. The rise of literacy (over purely verbal communications) was transformational for humans, not only for how they communicated, but also how thinking was stimulated and how ideas were preserved and passed on.

Literate people find it difficult to imagine the purely oral cultures that preceded modern societies. And, it's uncomfortable for many to recognize the "post literate" culture that is rapidly evolving in the Internet age.

In the US most newspapers are reporting accelerating declines, and the same is true of all developing countries. Do you read newspapers? I don't anymore - I get my news from on a variety of sources on the Internet, including text, video and audio.

From time to time my local newspaper is dumped on my doorstep, to entice me to start reading it again. I've tried now and then, but I always give up fairly quickly - it seems like too much of a chore to dig out the news that interests me from the cluttered advertising. And it's too easy to retrieve what I'm looking for with a few clicks on my computer.

Now here's another thing about reading. When I "read" the news on the Internet, I usually scan the headlines and read more of what I want to read with a click. But that's still reading. What's increasingly evident recently is the video story - something I can view directly, without having to having it interpreted for me by a biased writer. I can know more about Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton by viewing their speeches, than by reading about them.

You know the old saying, "A picture is worth 1,000 words". Today the visual culture is taking over - TV, DVDs and videos are rapidly replacing books and magazines. As a consequence, literacy, verbal and communication skills are declining fairly rapidly. After decades of growth in the number of books published, a decline of about 10% was reported in 2006, from 2005. Between 1982 and 2002, literary reading declined by about 10% in virtually all segments of the US population. And more telling, the rate of decline for those aged 18-24 was 55% more than for the total.

In the age of electronic media people spend 80% of their non working/sleeping time watching TV. Children growing up in this electronic age seem capable of watching television, listening to music and studying, all at the same time. It's the age of multi-tasking. TV shows, YouTube clips, animations, and other video applications already account for more than 60% of Internet traffic; some think that in 2 years it will be 98%.

Electronic media is a sensory media - it deals with images that do not have to be understood. It engulfs the viewer with several senses. It is non-linear - TV stories often jump from one situation to another, allowing the viewer to participate in several sub-stories at the same time. Books do that - but not with the same easy comprehension.

Video games are growing fast, and taking up the time that TV used to in the past. TV and movies are passive - by contrast, video games demand involvement and skill development. Americans now spend more money on video games than movies.

In the post-literate society the written word will not disappear. It will simply becme part of a changing mix of verbal versus visual, passive viewing versus active involvement.