Communication Transformation

How is it that Friday’s IllustrationFriday.com topic always manages to eerily match the topic that seems to be festering within my mind that given Friday?

This week’s topic of “Communication” seemed to arrive simultaneously with the March-April 2007 issue of The Futurist magazine, a copy of which recently landed on my desk with this provocative headline:

“The New Media Age: End of the Written Word?”

Addressing the question within the magazine is a team of writers and cyberscribers who pen their bleak perspective on the subject.

Several articles discuss what is referred to as the future’s “postliterate era” – a time (by 2050) when “instead of reading words or numbers, people are forming their views on the basis of pictures,” and “talking computers incorporating multisensory, multimodal technology will make written language obsolete.”

As one article in The Futurist claims, “the ultimate mechanism of doom for our civilization will be the rise of the image and the death of the written word.”

Based on what can be read here, the theory appears to be that nonprint forms/sources of information, such as mobile telephones and Web sites such as YouTube and MySpace, are creating a foundation for the existence of the future “educated illiterate."

While all of this has made for compelling reading, I must admit that sharing this recent prognosis for the written word has not made me terribly popular with other certain writer friends lately.* Still, I have to wonder if there is truth in some of what I have read here, including the idea that, as author John Naisbitt writes, “visual culture is taking over the world – at the expense of the written word.”

I also have been questioning the outcome for all communication (both visual and written) in relation to our new digital age – what happens to the record of the history of a generation or generations when most of this record is reliant solely on the existence of that period's technology?

While such ideas have been interesting to ponder, one perspective has (so far) kept me from joining the recent doomsday-for-writing hype: The knowledge that most of these ideas were initially generated and/or discussed through a magazine and the printed word. It is my thought that nothing communicates better than the written word when it comes to sharing deeper truths, ideas, paranoia or mass hysteria.

And optimist that I am, I have to believe: Surely the world will always have a special place for all of these.

*About the author: Writer, blogger, illustrator and visual artist Mia (a.k.a. "The Great Blogbina") intends to further support the written word by printing and sharing this blog entry with friends and perhaps even displaying it on a wall -- right next to a cartoon picture of The Great Blogbina.