In a short but provocative piece at edge.com Berkeley’s Marti Hearst suggests we will see text decline in favor of video and speech based interactions in the future. This is not the first time the predictions for the power of new media have been made (David Jonassen infamously predicted in 1982 that the book would be dead within a decade) but Hearst’s argument is more nuanced and based on emerging trends in video search retrieval and mobile technology use. Of course, the real bottleneck here is text input – for years I’ve argued that we are slaves to qwerty keyboards and that the really meaningful and valuable parts of our information resources can be transported and stored easily except for this handicap of needing a screen and a keyboard to access them. That said, I don’t see text in decline as much as unfortunately shackled to interfaces that in turn shackle us, and it’s not clear to me that a shift from text to video solves this particular problem. Ideally we would find ways of providing input and display technologies pervasively in the built environment or about our persons so we can access what we want where we are without carrying a keyboard everywhere. It speaks volumes to the power of the keyboard that so many people are willing to use one even when it’s reduced to the size of a telephone keypad. Text has evolved a series of affordances that extend beyond the mechanics of input and output however — the text genre of science reflects social practice and the cognitive advantages of being able to re-read and navigate through a familiar structure cannot be easily replaced or even replicated. Imagine ‘reading’ the Hearst article as a video (well, it might be more pleasant if Marti herself was delivering it) and try jumping around to revisit some points. The smoothness with which you can do this on the textual display is very hard to replicate with voice and video. Add to this, we can process textual information as skilled readers faster and in more fluid temporal forms than we can listen to a voice.
Naturally I am biasing my argument to the design side informed by human psychology, and there is obviously a set of related arguments about culture and the decline of typing and written text in favor of chatting, watching, demonstrating and presenting via images, It may be true that, as others have argued, serious extended reading is in decline and the communicative forms we will share and create in the decades ahead may well be shorter and less textual. But it is also possible that we will just retain text and supplement it. Remember, digital technology was supposed to be the death of paper too, until we realized that printing and faxing were so easy. Still, Hearst argues that video and images, not text, will do the cultural heavy lifting in the future and if nothing else, the point is worthy of consideration. I’m just not sure what medium is doing any of that lifting at the moment given the apparent insatiable appetite people have for images of a pop singer’s funeral when the world’s leaders are discussing global warming but the public gets what the public wants, as Paul Weller put it so memorably, in a song not a text (and can you be information literate without knowing that reference?)
In my never ending quest to be information literate, I had to look up Paul Weller. So now I guess I am.
While keyboards and the like may be slow for input into devices, text is still (at least for me) killing audio and video as for getting info into _me_.
I agree with Chris Dent that a key strength of text is the ease with which it can be processed, indexed, and retrieved while preserving some approximation of meaning
have you ever watched an 18 year old text while driving? it is the most bizarre thing. it has been banned in utah and it goes to show that communicating with words needs to be categorized differently. not all text is the same, just because it’s in english doesn’t mean that it communicates the same way every time. most of the texting that comes out of younger people these days is pure garbage. it’s a wonder that they even want to be educated at all.