This idea is what made me despise Rainbow's End. Vernor Vinge expects me to believe that in 20 years from 2006, teenagers will be completely illiterate due to the Internet. Even assuming instant video and audio streaming directly into the brain (which I'm pretty sure doesn't exist in the novel), that assumes that within ten years of the novel's publication, reading will be taken off the school curriculum entirely. That puts far too much faith in the efficiency of a government-run school system to adapt- in real life they'd be teaching reading for fifty years after the death of the written word and still be tied up in legislation.
Bottom line, people are going to write, and they're certainly going to type. You can read text at your own pace, unlike video and audio. Until you can instantly upload things to your brain, print can't die, and even then, it will have its uses.
We're not just men of science, we're men of TROPE!It'll all just get put on ebooks and shit like that.
If you're implying that things like reading and writting (typing?) are going to disappear...well...I'd laugh at that idea.
My other signature is a Gundam.Does TV tropes look like a video blogging site to you?
I think it's rather ludicrous, but nonetheless trends can have a nasty habit of dragging us all in. Everyone signed up for Facebook because their friends were doing it and they would lose out otherwise. It is possible that many people will just stop reading and migrate to video. Their friends could be forced to move to video to stay in touch. Snowball effect. It is a nightmare scenario, hopefully it is unlikely as so many people recognise the value of learning languages in text form in the first place.
The written word has so much more depth to it than the spoken word. We must not let language decline into anti-intellectual newspeak.
Requiem ~ September 2010 - October 2011 [Banned 4 Life]Everybody starts doing things because everyone else is doing it. It's less common for everyone to stop doing something, unless it was just a fad to begin with.
But are we more literate than we were ten years ago?