I saw a Facebook picture of a long-standing colleague of mine in a bookstore. The picture was an ad for Half-Price Books. I thought it was really unusual for this friend to be in such an ad. She and I were going to co-write a book at one time back in the year 2000 about the coming decade's effect on reading and writing. We both thought that all the new technology would have a ravaging effect on reading and writing. Unfortunately, her life led her in a different direction from our task in writing that book. But, she has since received her doctorate in education and is currently a principal in a high school in the North Texas area. Conversations with her between the year 2000 and now have shown me that she hasn't changed her mind from the days when we were mapping out chapters to write of the coming demise of reading and writing.
So, I thought it strange to be perusing through my Facebook images and see my friend's picture advertising a book store. I just wrote one word in my comment on her picture. Books?
Her answer confirmed what we all know to be true 17 years past that millennial year of planning. Really, Barnes and Noble developed the Kindle just to stay in the game. But they, like all the others, know what the end game is for reading. If you walk into a modern Barnes and Noble, you will see the number of aisles dedicated to books have dwindled. So, that is why my friend's response to my comment was something that made me reply with You know I'm going to have to write a blog about this. LOL.
She really had not changed her stance on reading and writing. Half-Price Books needed all the advertising help they could get, even having a good doctor of education pose beside its name in exchange for a discount on a couple of old LPs she was purchasing - music, not even books. I'm still laughing.
This year celebrates the centennial for the compulsory education laws in the United States. Mississippi in 1917 was the last state to pass such a law for its students. The idea, of course, was that the U.S. would be better off with an educated work force with a by-product of everyone being able to perpetuate the idea of democracy because they would be an enlightened public.
Well, congratulations to the U.S. for seeing that everyone not only gets an education, but an excellaent one at that, because now half of graduating seniors make As as they pass into society as adults.
I am sure you can hear me laughing hysterically at this point. Seriously! And I'm also sure you have tried to like carry on like a conversation with like one of the like seniors who has like graduated like from a 2017 class. It's quite disturbing.
This class of seniors graduated with a 24 point drop in the average SAT score from last year's average, which had also dropped from the previous year. Every year states publish articles in their newspapers railing against how poorly students have performed on their states' tests. Students from this class never had a 100 point grading system in their entire school career. The lowest grade any student could make was 50. So their A is from a 50 point playing field rather than a 100 point field. Statistics from this class, if disaggregated into ethnic groups, have a at least two subgroups that have one of the lowest graduating rates in 40 years.
But... okay, let's celebrate those As and ignore the crumbling system that produced them.
At this point, the die has been cast. Over the last ten years the world has changed from print-intensive to digital-file-intensive. If I "write a note" to someone, it is by text or email - a digital file. In two more years, texting will be only for those who learned how to text and capped their knowledge of how to use technology at that point. Most new cars being sold today can change text to voice if you receive a text while driving or change your own voice to text to send to someone. But, the next step is already on the rise. A lot of people even now use video messages, such as Glide, Tango, Skype, Hangouts, ooVoo, Peer, and iVideo, to send short messages. Even if you don't want to send messages, people like to have fun by sharing their experiences. SnapChat knows this and sells glasses that record 10 seconds of video of whatever you are looking at, stores it in the cloud, and sends it to anyone by voice command.
Probably not in the public schools because they lag from 5-10 years behind, but everywhere else - students in schools, universities, corporate training sessions, professional and continuing education development for medicine, law, engineering, technology, and sciences - printed materials are not being used. People are imparting information through video means, objects from 3D printers, 3D simulations, and holographic presentations.
It's really too late in the game now to stop reading and writing from carrying the load of sharing information any longer. The two are being relegated more and more to minor chores. This blog itself will change when 2017 changes to 2018 into a video blog. It's hypocritical at the very least to continue in written form. But what better way to illustrate the change from the written word to the visual world than to celebrate the end of the ten-year war that has outlined and tracked the demise of reading and writing by dropping the written version of this blog in favor of a video version.
To the dinosaurs among us, the meteorite has hit the Earth, exploded, and created the catastrophic forces of water deluge, mach 1 sound waves, and burning rain of rock and Earth from the force of the strike that will completely eliminate the species. Death is imminent. There will not be a funeral. People will move on, not using print, but the devices they carry (for now), to present, transmit, receive, and enjoy the world around them and preserve any knowledge they want to perpetuate.
