Two years ago, a creative director I was working with on a project for Microsoft Zune told me that kids today are ‘post-literate.’ They don’t read and they don’t write – everything is video and mobile and online, he said. I wondered aloud what he thought they were doing that would enable them to go completely without reading or writing – after all, basic literacy is required for most digital behavior (e.g., texting, blogging, reading sites & blogs, entering URLs, figuring out which link to click, search, email, tweeting, etc.). The world, as near as I can tell, is as reliant as ever on the written word. In fact, post-literacy doesn’t mean the elimination of language, it means passive literacy – people who favor visual, oral and aural communication over the written word. This creative director believed that we are on a path towards a majority rule of post-literates, a path not far from Fahrenheit 451, or McLuhan’s imagining of the global village in The Gutenberg Galaxy.
I suspect however, that it’s more subtle than this – I think we’re seeing language increasingly as data and code: in a database driven world, language is critical. We tag items with text in order to make search and sort more efficient. We invent hashtags as both a means of searching for threads of conversations and for telling little jokes. Users invent code to enable effective communication on Twitter and other social services. We comment, we link, we share, we post. And each time we do, we caption the content to provide some context to others (with the brilliant and wonderful exception of Listicles Without Commentary, which are comments themselves).
But this is an evolution, not a revolution. A fast evolution, admittedly, but not fundamentally altering human nature.
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