2014: a milestone year

My nephew and his wife recently had a child, so I went to see them in the hospital.  During the course of the conversation, my nephew mentioned that he had a friend with a two-year-old girl.  The girl was given a magazine to look through while my nephew conversed with the girl's father.  But, the little girl didn't know how to turn the pages of the magazine.  She was trying to swipe the page with her forefinger to get it to change.  Just love that story.

I have been on record since the year 2000 as saying that reading and writing were an endangered activity.  At that time, I thought that the year 2017 would be the end of a technological war in which books and  reading and writing would become rare.  If holographic devices come out by the year 2014, then the prediction will be true.

In August, a niece on the other side of my family reported that her two-year old figured out how to circumvent the password she had put on her iphone and played Angry Birds.  The school district in Frisco, Texas, was reported on the news as teaching their 2nd graders keyboarding instead of printing.  Advertisements on TV and news programs continue the trend to use more and more iconic/graphic controls instead of words to control their stream of information.  A current ipad2 commercial shows a basketball coach using the ipad2 to draw a play for his team during a timeout.  Another shows a complete fireplace built out of tablets, all showing fire dancing in a fireplace, one on each screen.  Cars now have displays that control everything in the car from phone to temperature, not counting the other features such as the GPS.  Although not all linguists agree, some think that learning java script is the same as learning a language.  One school even offers Java to fulfill the language requirement.

Humans will always need to communicate.  But the format of that exchange of ideas will change.  Writing will no longer record those exchanges.  Reading that writing will be replaced with eyes recognizing iconic/graphic symbols.  Already reading patterns for web pages have changed children's reading pattern from the Z pattern to the F pattern because web pages use left navigation to move around a page and children learn to scan words rather than read them in order to get quick and sketchy information.  That could be the real reason children find it painful to read books.

I look forward to 2014.  It will be a landmark year in the turn in the battle for how communication will go for the 25 years following it.  There is a war being waged right now by those of the old guard who don't think the replacement for reading and writing is adequate.  In fact, iconic/graphic scanning is a quantum leap ahead of the old way of communicating and those of the avantgarde will win this war in every field from technology to business, from music to education.  Children 4 and under today will not have to learn the scrawls and runes of communicating for they will have a speedier, much more efficient way of expressing themselves.  If social media teaches us anything, it is that people love their pictures and will tell their stories in that manner.

I will love the change.  I will not be attending the funerals of those who decide to die first in keeping ancient scripts alive.  The children I am responsible for will be ready to enter the new world.