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[Reviewed in THE FUTURIST, November-December 2004]
VIVO [Voice-In-Voice-Out]: The Coming Age of Talking Computers by William Crossman. Regent Press. 2004. 213 pages. $25.95. Paperback. Available from the Futurist Bookshelf.
Will talking computers make written language obsolete?The End of Written Language?
When was the last time you went into any fast-food restaurant and the employees actually punched in the price of your order on the cash register? Nowadays, the kids behind the counter are pressing buttons with little pictures of cups, tacos, or bags of fries instead of being asked to read or remember the costs of things. Want extra cheese? Well, there's a button with a stylized graphic of a block of cheddar--a triangular hunk already sliced out of it--that does the trick.
Take that process, notch it up a thousandfold, and you have the world envisioned by William Crossman in his book VIVO [Voice-In/Voice-Out]: The Coming Age of Talking Computers. Crossman's future is a society where computers operate everything and humans access services through icons and speech to such an extent that written language has become obsolete. Such an idea is by no means new: Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek universe encompasses computers that respond to verbal commands. But even in that world, the written word remained if not relevant then at least there. No such room for written language exists in Crossman's vision, which he nicknames VIVO. Everything from education and literature to transportation and cartography will be run by speaking to a computer that responds verbally or with visual messages reduced to iconography.
Crossman, founder and director of the CompSpeak 2050 Institute for the Study of Talking Computers and Oral Cultures, bases his conception on several very real trends. Writing and reading have declined in many industrialized nations, and young people's literacy skills have declined correspondingly or remained extremely low. Furthermore, most young people prefer communicating, storing, and retrieving information orally and "non-text visually." It can't be denied that certain corporate signs--the golden arches, for example, or a certain yellow-shoed, bipedal mouse--as well as hundreds of other icons are understandable to billions of people internationally. Why is it necessary to know the letters N-I-K-E when the all-too-familiar "swoosh" logo will do just fine? Crossman asks the same question and takes the concept to its logical conclusion.
Four "engines" are driving this evolution. The first is Homo sapiens' preference for speech over other forms of communication. This leads directly to the human drive to develop technologies that allow access to information by speaking and to replace older technologies with ones that do the same job quicker and more efficiently. Third, Crossman acknowledges the electronic-mindedness of young people--growing numbers of people who are rejecting text in favor of speech-driven and non-text technologies. Last, there are the billions of nonliterate people who want access to information but are hindered by poor reading, writing, and language skills.
To fully appreciate Crossman's vision, it is necessary to jettison some preconceptions about written communication--a tall order, no doubt, especially for readers and their insistence on the written word. Indeed, one could argue that Crossman works against his own theory by providing little in the way of illustrations and relying almost entirely on words to advance his argument. Only in his discussion of numbers does he resort to the iconography he espouses. Crossman's numbers theory would be based on the placement of numbers on a telephone keypad (that the keypad on most computers has the numbers in a different configuration is not discussed, even though Crossman's system is computer-based and not telephone-based). Braille-like, each number is assigned a dot in a different place in a delineated rectangle, so anyone using the VIVO system would know what number is meant. Thus the concept of one, two, three and 1, 2, 3 is conveyed without using words or numerals.
But herein lies a problem Crossman addresses insufficiently: Does not substituting one symbol for another (dots for numbers for words) essentially mean substituting one written language for another? The VIVO technicians could just as easily say that the symbol 9 stands for the concept nine as say that a dot in a certain place stands for nine. In this case (and elsewhere), adopting a new system seems arbitrary.
Anticipating criticism, Crossman thoughtfully provides readers with a FAQ. An interesting scenario is addressed here: "Won't the fact that no one else will be able to read or write make it easier for the power elite to exploit them?" A good question, but the answer--that the elite will use "secret spoken, coded-sound and/or coded-non-text-visual VIVO languages"--is not all that comforting.
The highlight of the book is the prologue, "a day in the life of a twenty-first-century oral-culture family," set in 2050. A mother and her two children go through their daily routines entirely under the influence of their VIVOs, from the music they listen to, to the way they accomplish their education (four-year-old Thomas is completing fifth grade), to the mother's job as an op-ed columnist. Their daily adventures are contrasted nicely with their 1980s-educated grandmother, who must be spoken to at a slower rate and who holds her tongue when it comes to her grandchildren's inability to read or write.
The omnipresent VIVO technology holds some astonishing promise, not the least being the opening of doors for the disenfranchised. Through VIVO, people all over the world will have access to information without having to learn how to read or write. Crossman furthermore envisions a worldwide oral culture where "all the nations and communities of the world, thanks to the invention of talking computers, will gain the potential capability to merge technologically, linguistically, and informationally." Such a world vision is indeed awe-inspiring, and while the author acknowledges that this may be a step backward to "pre-literate" times, it holds the possibility of doing some real good.
Readers may be skeptical that the corporate world will supply VIVOs for free, as Crossman predicts, or that it will be as simple as he believes to supply the world with VIVO technology. But, given the current trends and the speed with which technology and communications are evolving, VIVO is indeed a viable vision of the future. It is, at least, a hopeful one, and futurists could do worse than ponder Crossman's ideas and concepts.
About the Reviewer
Clifton Coles is associate editor of THE FUTURIST.
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