About halfway

Today someone asked me to keep a lookout for reading material and/or texts for 9th graders.  It was hard to slow my head from nodding "No."  It's an old subject, but here goes the 200th verse of the same song.

In the year 2000 a friend and I began a book that we never finished.  The chapters were to detail the demise and lack of need for the ability to read and write.  I know that people have decried the sorry state of affairs for both abilities, but I wanted to herald the disappearance of reading and writing.  Since that time on this blog I have tried to warn people of a struggle that would break out in society that would go way beyond poor scores in reading and writing on standardized tests for public school students.  The struggle would last 10 years and end with the unmistakable next stage in transmission of information, including storytelling.

My favorite analogy is to the striking of the meteorite in the Yucatan that killed the dinosaurs.  Dinosaurs were kings of the world and the top of the food chain for millions of years.  But they were unaware up until the time of the strike that not one single dinosaur would make it out alive after the series of devastations set off by the meteorite's crashing into the Earth.  The event is marked by iridium between layers of the Earth's crust called the KT boundary.

 The death of reading and writing will be marked with a 10 year tug-of-war between those who advocate the need for reading and writing forever and those who are bringing in a much more efficient and a quantum leap faster mode of relaying information.  The war would begin in 2007 and end after 2017.  The need to read and write would disappear after 2017, and when people recognized the new path being forged, they would hasten the dying forms for transmission of knowledge and entertainment that has lasted for so many centuries as the paramount mode for perpetuation.

When December comes and goes, the struggle will be halfway over.  From every sign I see, everything is right on schedule.  Other voices have joined mine in warning others of the impending doom of two of the three Rs.  Two of the important signs can be capsulized by two commercials and two innovations.  The first commercial is for a speech to type device so that people can speak their words and type will appear on a page.  The ability to create information on a page from a voice command will not be limited to type for long.  Creating visual logs from speech is next.  The second is for the Iphone's ability to speak a question and get the answer in a matter of seconds or utter a command and the task will be performed.  Since visual information can be archived also, it is a matter of time before that kind of information will be commanded.  The first innovation is the smart phone, complete with its myriad number of apps that can control lighting and temperature in houses, count the number of calories eaten, recognize information coded in bars and other encryption codes, and "read" notes in a song and tell you its title among a thousand other useful tasks.  The second innovation is the ability to be somewhere virtually, without travel and without loss of dimensionality.   The appearance of two other inventions will sound Taps for reading and writing: holographic virtuality and invisibility (cloaking) in matters of stealth.  Both are right around the corner - probably about 5 years away.

I hope to see the years after 2017.  There will be remnants plenty of the age that has just passed.  But there will be a layer of iridium separating the two epochs.  Readers and writers won't fare well in the new world.  The currency of the educated will be different.  Those who know how to organize electronic data and format what people visualize will conduct the funerals of those whose pens, pencils, and typing keys only make the runes of sentences and paragraphs.  R.I.P.