The future of Writing and Reading
By writing, I mean those creations which are meant to be consumed as words.
In other words, those works that are meant to be read!
But the variety that exists in the term is apparent. I have tried to somewhat collect them.
On the basis of style I found these here:
Persuasive, Narrative, Expository, and Descriptive.
On the basis of types I found these here:
Blogs, Scripts, Journals, Poetry/Ad Songs, Letters, Essays, Speeches, Storytelling, Advertising and Marketing…
But since we are talking about reading as an end — scripts, songs, speeches get negated, leaving us with:
Blogs, Journals, Poetry, Letters, Essays, Stories, Advertising and Marketing.
Popular segmentation of writing is in two broad categories:
Fiction and NonFiction
Fiction being that which is imaginative in nature. The events it talks about being manufactured. Nonfiction being that which is factual in nature.
With all these defined, let us talk about their future. It has to be said that when talking about it we will not be talking of the style, type, category or just the formats that will prevail or thrive tomorrow. We will be talking about writing profession and reading as a whole.
To understand the future, first we need to understand the present.
Writing is alive and kicking today.
I say this because, as it turns out, there are around 2 million new books published each year globally (excluding a few nations).
Combined print book and e-book sales hit 942 million units in 2020.
Amazon sells about 22 million Kindle Books.
Some say, the number of blogs in existence is about 600 million.
There are 2 million scientific articles published each year.
There are more than a 100 million publications in Research Gate from around 17 million users
There are 55 million articles in 309 languages in Wikipedia.
Our own medium has well more than 100 million monthly readers.
All these numbers tell us that writing and reading are alive and kicking today.
But what about the future?
Since this is a very difficult and vague task, and since writing/reading today is doing pretty well, I merely want to look at current threats to them in order to make an educated guess as to what might the future hold.
As we have seen, the present looks good and if the future is to continue like this, writing and reading have no-threat at all. In fact, they will only grow stronger and stronger from here on. Since we are talking about an activity that has been going on for more than 5000 years and have seen and survived the craziest of obstructions, the chance of them not surviving at all seems low from this viewpoint.
However, there are a few factors that might hinder their advance and if not kill today, make them obsolete in the long-term.
They are the threats which provide experiences that are better at performing functions of writing and reading. The type which made Roald Dahl scream the following:
…We’ll answer this by asking you,
‘What used the darling ones to do?
‘How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?’
Have you forgotten? Don’t you know?
We’ll say it very loud and slow:
THEY … USED … TO … READ! They’d READ and READ,
AND READ and READ, and then proceed
To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!
The nursery shelves held books galore!
Books cluttered up the nursery floor!
And in the bedroom, by the bed,
More books were waiting to be read…
The Threats
- Other mediums
Continuing with the scepticism shown by Dahl towards Television,
I believe anything that can replace the experience of reading can replace the profession of writing for reading.
Audios and Videos have the most potential in achieving that.
Audiobooks are on the rise:
Numbers and Facts You Need to Know About Audio Content in 2021 — Business 2 Community
Continuity of the radio school of Information, the audiobooks, while may not be even close to print-books, have already fared better than ebooks.
Podcasts are also doing good and there is an ever improvement on AI reading.
There are innovations taking place in audiobooks and the fact that younger people tend to prefer it more, proves that audiobooks alongside cousin audio formats and styles are serious contenders to the throne of read-writing-hood.
Videos
Along with audial formats, videos are also doing pretty good in providing information typically reserved for reading. A quick search on YouTube of academic stuff will reveal the variety of ways through which people are innovatively presenting knowledge. Use of visually appealing animations, footages, concise use of words and sentences are slowly but surely taking videos towards the effectiveness of reading.
Innovations in both fictional and documentary films have challenged reading time and time again. Documentary films hold tremendous potential.
Virtual Reality also promises to change the game.
I elsewhere talked about the difference between different formats:
https://medium.com/@ades_abcd/visual-vs-audial-vs-textual-learning-9f51cf9d1baa
Reading is still very relevant because it is the best way to grasp and interpret conceptual and complex information. But other formats are catching up. The future of writing and reading will depend upon the innovations and adaptations in audio and video.
BCIs and beyond— Writing is basically an expression of thoughts. While BCIs are still in their infancy, I seriously think they will change a lot of games forever. Writing has a serious challenge here.
But, BCI currently seems to be dependent on time and genius breakthroughs. Even when they have reached a point of impact, making everyone adapt to it might be a challenge in itself. Other technologies for better thought-expression will surely come up.
2. Artificial Writing Systems
Q: What does a technology entrepreneur want?
A: Money
Yes, those who are working on Artificial Systems don’t care about writing, writers, reading and readers. If they smell great money in AI written stuff, Why should they?
And then one will come along with a cheesy tagline such as —
now you too can write like Shakespeare with our xyz AI.
and the other with —
our goal is to bring out the writer in everyone with our abc Bot.
All this is happening and will only continue to grow, potentially turning human-writing into an obsolete skill.
But this again is a debate on Artificial Intelligence and its outcome is currently dependent on what we choose.
3. Data driven writing
A sickly trend that is haunting everyone with an inclination towards creativity, originality, innovation and experimentalism, data-driven content creation will surely prove to be catastrophical to human thinking and not just to writing and reading.
The lure of immediate return has already turned many potential creatives into Ad-Sense and trend hunting hyenas all thanks to the greed of those insatiable pathetic monsters like Alphabet.
The prospect of earning good cash by giving people what they want, has already trapped us all in a vicious web weaved by those monsters which might in long-term turn humanity into jumping in a single place in the name of movement creatures. This will blow away not only writing and reading but the credibility and impact of every other format mentioned above.
Conclusion
The future of writing and reading is dependent upon present writers and readers.
If we can manage to:
a. evolve read-writing alongside audios, videos, films, VRs and BCIs in such a way that it always provides something better,
b. evolve writing to such a point that greedy AI developers can never ever catch up, and
c. promote experimentation and innovations in human created narratives and words
we can surely make writing and reading relevant for a long long time if not as long as we will exist as a species.
The question then is not — what is the future of writing and reading? BUT
what should the future of writing and reading be?
But more more importantly it all depends on how we manage to fight against those monsters that currently own and control our digital and non-digital lives.
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