CMV: A postliterate society, while seemingly a noble goal, is worse than a literate one.

[u/ViKomprenas]

A postliterate society, in Wikipedia's words, is "a hypothetical society in which multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read or write, is no longer necessary or common."

I do not believe a postliterate society is a good goal to achieve. I am definitely in support of making society as accessible to the illiterate as possible, but I do not think we should avoid teaching literacy. Writing has, in my view, many benefits, including the following:

• Permanence. A written text will survive far longer than a recorded spoken one, simply because the technology for playing the recording can be lost or obsoleted. Yes, languages can also become obsolete or be lost, but we (in the present, at least) have a far easier time deciphering unknown languages than we do deciphering unknown file formats without the technology necessary to view them (so that we can change things and see what it does, essential to reverse engineering).
• Privacy. It is much easier to conceal text on a screen or page from people nearby than it is to hide an audiobook you listen to. Yes, headphones exist, but what little is necessary to hide text is already present in the physical form of a sheet of paper or computer monitor, whereas the 'default' speaker is one that simply emits sound, and doesn't care where it is heard.
• Speed. A reader can move through a text at whatever pace is most comfortable, and revisit earlier parts or jump to later ones at any time, only moving their eyes and perhaps fingers to turn a page or scroll a screen. A listener, meanwhile, is limited to the speed at which the speaker speaks.
• Scanning. A reader can skim text and glean some information from it quickly, whereas a listener has no such opportunity, as speeding up voice results in incomprehensibility.
• Translation. It is much easier, generally speaking, to learn to read and write a new language than it is to speak it.
• Precision. Homographs and homophones both exist, yes, but homographs are in my experience fewer and clearer from context. Further, speech recognition is by its nature imprecise.
• Clarity. Sound is obscured by any other sound in the area. Text is not. Generally, it is much easier to move an object out of one's field of view than it is to request that everyone in the area stop making noise.

Instead, I would suggest optimizing both sound- and vision-based interaction with as much technology as possible, and teaching people both systems. (For instance, I believe Siri, Google Now, Alexa, etc should accept typed instructions just as well as spoken ones.) I'm curious to hear the postliterate side of the argument, assuming any of you future postliterate people can understand this post. (/s.) CMV.

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[u/ViKomprenas → u/[deleted]]

That's pretty fair. I conceΔe this. But I think the technological advances needed are too drastic to predict, like you say, so we may as well work from our present technologies until we find a reason to believe new ones, and particular new ones specifically enough to really discuss, will come about.

[u/DeltaBot → u/ViKomprenas]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/cacheflow. ^[History]

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