ntouk.com - Jerry Fishenden's technology policy blog

Is the supremacy of text - of the written word and literature in general - coming to an end? Is this one of the emerging characteristics that will define the impact of the current digital age?

Take a look at what's happening around us with digital media: video on demand, Webcasts, Internet-based radio and television, podcasts and interactive rich media content. Communication tools like search, instant messaging, email, blogs, and universal "In-boxes" (where all communcations - including voicemails and faxes - are integrated in the same applications as traditional text-based emails).

We grew up in an age when the written word took supremacy over other forms of communication. When reading and writing - the literate age if you like - was the accepted way of capturing and disseminating knowledge, ideas, entertainment and learning. This has I guess been the prevailing model since Caxton and Gutenberg. Books and literature once defined learning, conferred social status - and underpinned the way in which formal education was conceived, delivered and consumed.

But no longer is it necessary to capture and share our ideas and experiences using text alone. I'm not saying that the written word will disappear. Merely that it will no longer be accorded the supremacy over other means of interaction that it has held for so many centuries. Perhaps in the overall sweep of history, the dominance of the written word will prove to have been merely a blip, a small footnote if you will - since oral traditions of learning through storytelling and performance were once the norm. Perhaps they will be so again - enabled by the digital age.

After all, many written words and notations were in any case merely a way of preserving content that would be manifested in a different form - take for example a Shakespeare play, or a classical musical score: for both of these, their real expression is in performance, not in the written notation.

We have entered an era in which we can capture pictures and sounds and communicate them easily to others - so why should the written word continue to dominate in the way that it has done? But it's interesting how persistent the written word is. It dominates our computer design - with keyboards, and even with TabletPCs, that emphasise the importance of writing and reading over other forms of interaction. Form and content in many of the devices we use seems to remain fused - whilst at the same time, technology has empowered us to separate form and content: one of the most significant and revolutionary developments of the digital era.

On podcast and Webcast sites, few (if any) allow you to respond in kind - instead, comments and responses consist of the written word. But why, I wonder, can't I just respond to a podcast with an audio response, or a Webcast with a video/audio response? It would be simpler, easier and more appropriate surely for me to click a button on my laptop and capture my response using a built in Webcam. Why is email still overwhelmingly text based - when it would be easier for me to capture a quick spoken thought, question or response and share that instead? My laptop has good voice recognition and speech synthesis features too - but the design of the hardware means that it's easier to slip back into the default and tap away on the keyboard.

Searching and navigating aural and visual media remains more complex of course than text - but even with text we often end up tagging content (like this blog posting), so it's little excuse for not moving more rapidly to a new way of thinking about the nature of content. Instead of school teachers asking their class for example to write an essay on what they did on their school holidays, why can't the pupils capture photos, soundclips, video etc and share those with each other? It's a much more real, comprehensive way of trying to convey to others our personal experiences and learnings. Text will remain important alongside these: I'm not saying reading and writing are displaced - merely that they become one of many ways of interaction, rather than the primary method.

So how do we characterise this change in the way we can capture and disseminate ideas? The ability to capture audio and video is still relatively young - after all it's only a little over a century ago that inventions such as the phonograph came into being. And it's only now that we've really entered an age when high fidelity means of capturing and sharing video and audio have entered the mainstream. And when the Internet means sharing and distributing can happen with incredible speed and scale.

The digital age will change everything - and despite all the hype and talk of Web 2.0 we're not really at the point when the way in which we capture, disseminate and interact with content has displaced the supremacy of the written word.

But it seems to me inevitable. There remains much talk of a "digital divide" - but we have so long grown accustomed to a world in which there is a "literacy divide" it is not often mentioned. The move to the digital era could be as democratising as the birth of the printing press was in the fifteenth century. It will bring the ability to capture and share human experiences, learning and entertainment in far more intuitive ways than the age of literacy allowed.

Right now, clearly we are just at the beginning. And at the begininning of the industrial revolution few would have predicted that within the space of 50 to 100 years, one person would be able to do a job that had previously required 200 people.

The scale of change coming in the digital era will make that industrial revolution transformation look trivial in comparison. We are about to transcend literacy.

[PS. And yes, there's something deeply ironic of course in setting out these thoughts as a written blog ... perhaps I should do a video or machinima version...?]

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