Will literacy become a thing of the past, to be replaced by a new VIVOlutionary "oral" culture?

I came across this book, which seems to predict the end of written language as being not only inevitable, but also as a good thing! Listening replaces reading:


VIVO [Voice-In/Voice-Out]: The Coming Age of Talking Computers

Review
"A welcome addition to the discussion about voice-recognition technology and the social implications of talking computers." -- Edward Cornish, President, World Future Society, Bethesda, Maryland

"Audacious and mind-stretching. Crossman sees our reliance on the printed word coming rapidly to an honorable end." -- Arthur B. Shostak, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

"If you are an educator, you need to read this book." -- Les Gottesman, Golden Gate University, San Francisco, California

Product Description
A positive look at how talking computers, VIVOs, will make text/written langauge obsolete, replace all writing and reading with speech and graphics, democratize information flow worldwide, and recreate an oral culture 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.

Four "engines" are driving us irreversibly into the VIVO Age and oral culture: human evolution, technological breakthroughs, young people's rejection of text, and people's demand for text-less, universal access to information.

Future generations, using eight key VIVOlutionary learning skills, 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.

Clearly the trend exists. I've seen in my lifetime, people reading less and less; getting their information from TV, radio, videos and movies, more than reading. But will it go so far as to actually make text and reading obsolete?

Imagine if there is a blackout or prolonged power outage. Nobody can read, because they get all their information from electronic devices that talk to them. Suddenly, everyone is a dumb-ass moron, until the power comes on again? Are we just becoming too dependent on electronic devices? If power goes out for an extended time, due to either natural or man-made causes, an illiterate population with no books would be in double trouble.

Oh Brave New World, with such (illiterate) people in it...
     

Has Orwell's "1984" been superseded by "1985", a voluntarily accepted "Soft Totalitarianism"?

Pat did a post recently called 1985. He was quoting an article in the British Spectator about voluntary Orwellianism, where it's not forced on people but voluntarily embraced by them. Creepy.

This article at the Brussel's Journal had a similar theme, and in part, examines how voluntary Orwellianism works:

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Political Correctness, and Soft Totalitarianism

[...] Bradbury, a man of letters, grasped with admirable certitude the fundamental relation of literacy and literature to the civilized order. The written word functions impersonally and abstractly: it mediates non-resentful relations between individuals and helps the individual to understand whether the institutions of his society are fulfilling or distorting their mission. The written word supports objectivity, criticism, and analysis: it enlarges and depends awareness and thus supports the civic order of the modern republics, as they came to be at the end of the Nineteenth Century. Literacy is a presupposition of the free circulation of values in the modern market. The spoken word, on the other hand, is, as it has been immemorially, personal, agonistic, and emotional. The theoreticians of orality and literacy associate the spoken word with primitive society, with tribalism, and with shame-culture – or frankly with the crudity of political propaganda. In a modern context, as Bradbury sees it, any lapse from cultivated literacy in a critical, cue-giving nucleus of the educated population represents a lapse from civilization, a deterioration of the social scene, and an instance of decline towards new savagery.

Big-screen, high-definition television sets therefore do not a civilization make, either in our actual world or Bradbury’s prophetic representation of it from fifty years ago. Conformity, on the other hand, television is good at establishing, and along with conformity all the bullying totems the taboos that hedge in thought and discussion and so disarm the society from taking critical stock of itself or judging the leadership or its policies rationally. The dictatorship of Fahrenheit 451 is a confidently self-regulating one that insures its continuity through the methodic inculcation of regressive taboos and infantile totems that render people no longer capable of examining or doubting what the state tells them. Our own political correctness is a system of regressive taboos and infantile totems that bludgeons people, by state-reinforced priggishness, into self-betraying cowardice and insipidity. With its readiness to denounce by hurling epithets, pandemic intolerance maintains obedience as effectively as a police force with automatic weapons. The fear and envy of small people who compensate for their feelings of inferiority by banding together are what drive and sustain dictatorial conformism. The state seizes on that fear and that envy and harnesses them cynically to its own schemes to secure and increase its power. The elites are driven as much by fear and envy as the masses; they enjoy leveling things out, which is for them a supremely moral experience, but they are more culpable than the masses because they know what they are destroying.

In this way the society in Fahrenheit 451 strikes one as more plausible today than its Orwellian alternative or indeed as having already been partially (and more than partially) realized in Europe and North America. Political correctness, whether it is in Bradbury’s imagined dictatorship or in our own therapeutic nanny state, permeates the society through the channels of commercial mediation that the state has co-opted. [...]

I think this goes a long way in explaining how "1985" Orwellianism becomes voluntarily accepted; as people become less literate, less imaginative, and more passive and more image-oriented, critical thinking suffers.

The whole article is rather long, and offers many more observations, including how Bradbury's book itself has had to be protected from the politically correct, dumbing-down process the very novel itself describes. Yikes.

Here is an example of the Soft Totalitarian principle in action at UMass:

Hecklers Ruin Free Speech Talk

The Big Brother enforcers, doing Big Brother's job, voluntarily. Welcome to the New and Improved Orwellian "1985".