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It’s 2023: Why do we still read and write?
We have better tech. We should have moved on.
I keep scrutinizing the Introduction of the book ‘Does Writing Have a Future?’ published in 1987 by the 20th-century philosopher Vilem Flusser.
Flusser speculates that writing, the process of ‘placing letters and other marks one after another,’ may not have a future. He argues that information can be transmitted by ‘other’ codes, and things that are written can be conveyed ‘more effectively on tapes, records, films, videotapes, videodisks, or computer disks.’
He goes on to claim that ‘Future correspondence, science, politics, poetry, and philosophy will be pursued more effectively through the use of these codes than through the alphabet or Arabic numerals.’
Flusser was a philosopher and not your ordinary ‘I close my eyes and see the future’ prophet. There were rational arguments behind his prediction. He argued that thinking is not a continuous process but writing is. He believed that once we have high-end digital machines we would be able to think in quantas and images — just like our machines. This would make the ‘historical’ method of thinking obsolete and writing is nothing but historical thinking.
I find Flusser brilliant because he had interesting things to say about Artificial…
