VIVO [Voice-In / Voice-Out]
The Coming Age of Talking Computers
By William Crossman
Regent Press
ISBN 1-58790-100-5, $24.95

VIVOs—voice-in/voice-out talking computers using voice-recognition technology and graphics but no text—will replace all text/written language in the electronically-developed countries by 2050. Text is an ancient technology for storing and retrieving information; VIVOs will do the same job more quickly, efficiently, and universally.

Among VIVO's potential benefits: 80% of the world's people are functionally nonliterate; they will be able to use VIVOs to access all information without having to learn to read and write. VIVO's instantaneous translation function will let people speak with other people around the world using their own native languages. People whose disabilities prevent them from reading and/or writing will be able to access all information.

Future generations will radically change education, human relations, politics, the arts, business, our relation to the environment, and even human consciousness itself. Worldwide access to VIVO technology looms as a key human rights issue of the 21st Century.

Author William Crossman is a philosopher, futurist, and professor involved with issues of education, media and technology, language and culture, and human rights. VIVO is published by Regent Press, longtime OPEN EXCHANGE lister. Here is a brief excerpt, reprinted by permission:

Writing and reading will no longer be culture-based essentials of our society. We will soon have other, easier, more accessible, more feasible options than writing and reading for storing and retrieving information.

Just as there will be people who will continue to make their own shoes, clothes, paper, pottery, home-brewed lager, or casseroles simply for the love of doing it, there will be people who will continue to write and read. But it won't be essential that they do. We're only a few LED flashblinks away (on our digital watches) from that 21st Century moment when it will be absurd to require people to learn writing and reading, as our schools do now.

"Not so fast!" you might say. Look at art. Don't people still continue to paint with brush on canvas, even though some artists now use a computer monitor as their "canvas" and a mouse, stylus, or their fingers as their "brush"? Don't we continue to build art institutes to teach painting and museums to exhibit paintings? Haven't we been painting since the dawn of human existence, and don't we imagine that we'll keep on painting until the sun sets on us? Surely, painting and digital art will coexist.

Now, you might continue, aren't we promoting reading and writing in the same way? Aren't there more books being published, more people learning to write and read worldwide, more people typing on computer keyboards and reading computer monitors, more people writing e-mail messages on the Internet, more business and personal letters being written than ever before? Won't we continue to write and read just as we'll continue to paint, despite the new technologies?

Let's backtrack a minute. I believe creating visual arts is a basic survival activity of human society. Painting, as one primary way we have created visual arts in our society for thousands of years, has been a culture-based essential, not a basic survival activity.
However, the visual arts are changing, too. Painting with paint, on surfaces is probably on the way out. Thousands of would-be artists are forsaking the brush and palette in favor of studying computer art and design at their high schools and colleges, or at one of the hundreds of new multi- media institutes. Many of these young artists have never even touched a paint brush. Digital art and holograms "painted" with laser beams offer today's artists new options that, in my opinion, are already threatening to make painting yesterday's medium.

If painting disappears, other methods of creating visual art will take its place and become essential in our society. That is because visual artists must communicate in visual terms; they have no other option.

Similarly, if writing and reading disappear, other methods for storing and retrieving information will take their place and become essential in our society. What other methods, what other options, will we have? Our best option: instead of writing it, we'll speak it, sign it, and/or present graphics of it to our VIVOs; instead of reading it, we'll listen to it, view sign language of it, and/or view graphics of it through our VIVOs...

What has been happening to poetry in many print-literate countries in the last decade gives us clues to the new direction. We've seen the explosive proliferation of public poetry readings, where poetry is recited, and the equally explosive emergence of "performance" poetry, which presents poetry combined with theater, music, and/or dance in public performance.

In poetry "circuses" and "slams," poets compete by reciting their poems, often improvising new poems on the spot, in front of boisterous audiences. Rap - the "performance" poetry of Black communities - is influencing cultures worldwide. Spoken-word concerts abound.... Taken together, these happenings define a trend: the oralizing-auralizing and democratizing of literature, leading to a world of poets and storytellers.

Regarding the visual arts, today's artists, from painters and printmakers to digital artists and holographers, have a VIVO inspired 21st Century surprise waiting for them. Increasingly, they've been incorporating text/written words into the visual designs of their works. The result is that these words introduce some level of semantic meaning into the overall visual designs which, in most cases, is what the artists intended.

The surprise is that, as we move toward an oral culture, these incorporated textual elements will lose their semantic relevance entirely and become solely graphic-design elements of the artworks. Why? Because by 2050, almost no one looking at an artwork containing text will be able to read the text or understand what it means or says....