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From: [log in to unmask] href="mailto:[log in to unmask]">Sue Thomas

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Sent: Saturday, May 14, 2005 2:02 PM

Subject: [WDL] Professorial trend spotter predicts end of written word

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first spotted on SmartMobs http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2005/05/11/professorial_tr.html
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Professorial trend spotter predicts end of written word

As voice technology proliferates the era of the text may fade, author muses
By Francine Brevetti, BUSINESS WRITER
Inside Bay Area

WILLIAM Crossman, a futurist and an English instructor at Vista Community College in Berkeley, believes that reading and writing are doomed.

The respected scholar gives the written word until 2050 to become a curiosity of the past. Such talk may inflame those who cherish the written word and make educators shriek.

Nevertheless, Crossman believes that talking computers, which we already have in a primitive form, will be storing and retrieving information for us rather than paper and text. We'll be talking to them and getting our information by asking questions rather than by checking our files or libraries.

Crossman, unlike others, does not wring his hands over this. He sees it as a positive.

The man with a gentle face and wispy hair is not afraid of hoots and flying tomatoes. They have been tossed at him before. A couple of years ago, Crossman spoke at a convention of the pulp and paper industry.

"I freaked them out," he said.

Crossman has codified his theories in a book, "VIVO [Voice-In/Voice-Out—: The Coming Age of Talking Computers," published by Regent Press, and on a Web site, www.compspeak2050.org.

When asked why we would give up what many consider to be culture's shining achievement — literacy and written language — Crossman says it's inevitable — text is merely one stage of our evolution, and it's on the way out.

He points to the phonograph, telephone, television, video, movies, and instant and text messaging lingo as proof of our culture's unconscious rebellion against text.

He cites statistics that show that IQ scores worldwide are getting higher as literacy rates are plummeting. Children especially just don't want to learn to read and write, and this is not just for the socioeconomic reasons people tend to ascribe to it, he contends.

"Other people are looking at the fact that there are more computers in schools, more e-mails, moreinstant messages being sent, more big books being printed," he said. "I'm looking at the other trends."

A resident of Oakland for 12 years, Crossman shares his home with his partner, Lea Weinstein, and two cats.

On his off hours, Crossman plays jazz piano with several bands at local venues and festivals such as the yearly Malcolm X Festival. Since he improvises, he doesn't worry about the disappearance of musical notation, which he predicts along with that of the written word.

A lot of his time also is spent as a human rights activist. Crossman belongs to the Jericho Amnesty Movement, which works for the release of "political prisoners of the'60s, blacks and native Americans, who were sentenced for such long periods they are still in prison today," he said.

Born in New Haven, Conn., Crossman grew up in segregated Hollywood, Fla.

"After high school, I got out of there as fast as I could and went to Cornell University in New York," he said.

He has always been interested in the newest ideas and trends, particularly the roles language and technology play in our culture. His influences include philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said language changes how we form questions about our existence. Crossman has become a modern-day Marshall McLuhan, the 1960s media theorist who famously said, "the medium is the message." Crossman's colleagues in futurist circles give him deference, though they may not agree.

Arthur B. Shostak, a sociology professor at Philadelphia's Drexel University, has known Crossman for more than 10 years through the World Future Society.

"He's taken seriously, although the core of his forecasts, that we are leaving reading and writing behind, has caused eyebrows to arch," Shostak said.

In San Francisco, Golden Gate University's director of general education, Les Gottesman, also has known Crossman for many years. He takes issue with Crossman's selection of the date 2050 as the death knell for written language, but he endorses Crossman's powers of observation.

"He is an accurate observer of current trends — for instance, students rejecting written tasks on such a wide scale and cutting across so many classes and categories of people," Gottesman said. "I'm not sure literacy will be abandoned entirely, but young people are abandoning many features of literacy."

Already, software has been developed to let people dictate to their computers without using their hands on the keyboard. Speech or voice recognition software continues to be refined. Microsoft has invested "billions in it," founder Bill Gates recently said. Crossman says the future of speech recognition computing is bringing the illiterate — 80 percent of the world's population — onto an equal footing with the rest of us. With speech recognition software, he argues, the Third World doesn't have to learn to read and write in order to gain economic independence and stability. They can just talk to their computers and retrieve information along with everyone else who's doing the same.

But can we picture life without Shakespeare, without Tom Clancy? How could we live without reading and writing?

Patiently, Crossman explains that people wouldn't have to give up literacy if they didn't want to. It would gain the status of a hobby, somewhat the way quilting is now. Instead, he said we will have an oral-aural culture, just as we did before some early civilization first drew lines in the sand with a twig. Crossman likens our future with talking computers to our experience with the calculator of some 30 years ago.

"The calculator was seen as a failure by educators, a crutch for basic arithmetic," he said. "But after two decades, it is not necessary to memorize the times tables anymore. The SAT tests allow kids to bring their calculators now to class. And we will have the same learning curve with giving up text."

Francine Brevetti can be reached at (510) 208-6416 or [log in to unmask].

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