My Millennial Prediction
Reading may become unnecessary, but it will never be undesirable
Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 1/1/2000
Listening and talking could replace reading and writing--but they won't.
A few months ago, I started thinking about what children's books might be like in the future. A vision rose unbidden from the swamp of my subconscious: a sturdy flat-screen viewer that showed (through video or animation files) and told (through audio) a story. There were no words to read. The idea scared me. My next thought: Could reading become unnecessary? Why had I imagined children's books of the future that way?
I had been reading about electronic books (or e-books), and figured future children's books would be e-books using flat-screen "page" technology. We now have "electronic ink"--specially formulated ink on "paper-like film" that changes when it receives electronic signals. In other words, two such "pages," allowing the device to close, can serve as an entire book. To learn how it works visit the E Ink Company's site at www.eink.com.
Recently I heard Bill Gates speak on the future of educational technology. He talked about similar flat-screen pages, which he called "readers," for school use. Students won't need to type or click anything to access their assignments; they'll run "smart cards" through a slot to get to them, the way we use our debit cards at the supermarket. Gates's readers would show streaming video and animation files as easily as words.
Gates also mentioned that voice-recognition technology soon will be coming into its own, and words spoken into a microphone will control a computer--or one of these readers--as easily as commands from a keyboard or clicks from a mouse do now. At the same time, synthesized computer voices--technology in place now in reading machines that read print for the visually impaired--will become more common. Electronic devices will speak to us, and we'll speak to them.
William Crossman, author of a new book, CompSpeak 2050, (information at www.compspeak2050.org/book.html), says, "We're witnessing the beginning of an earthshaking transformation of human society away from print culture and toward oral culture." He claims that humans prefer "speech-based methods for storing, retrieving, and communicating information.... Today's young people have already chosen video, audio, radio, film, and the telephone" over print as their technology of choice.
Many librarians, who have dealt with the successive manias for the Goosebumps, American Girls, and Harry Potter books, will disagree. But what if our brains could be wired directly to a Net that goes beyond anything we have now? Ray Kurzweil, who invented the original reading machines, now predicts an idea that is almost a cliche among science fiction readers--direct computer and Net connections into the brain. His book The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking, 1999) claims that within 30 years "nanobots," molecule-sized programmable devices, will be implanted in our brains to enhance memory and access to information. Even if students and workers aren't "hard-wired" by mid-century, but simply use flat screens, they could spend more time interpreting images and sounds than reading text.
The explosion of listening and talking computers we're certain to see in the next two decades will change the way everyone uses technology. Soon visual and audio information will be sent over the Net as easily as print, and an oral culture that had largely vanished in Western nations might return. Crossman says, "Literacy may survive as a pleasurable pastime: students in 2050 might join literacy clubs to learn written language for fun."
But I think he's wrong--pundits predicted the death of print when the Net first appeared, and since then Americans have bought more books than they did before. Reading may become unnecessary, but it will never be undesirable. Too many kids each generation find value in reading print, despite audiovisual temptations. Each new technology adds to the old ones; we still listen to the radio and attend live theater, long after television and movies entered our lives.
What, then, will the libraries of 2020 be like? I'm certain that they will be packed with media and materials we can't imagine now--right alongside the books.
