(Text written for the
virtual symposium text-e, organised by the Association Euro-Edu, the
Bibliothèque Publique d'Information du CEntre Pompidou and the Société
GiantChair on the impact of the Web on reading, writing and the diffusion of
knowledge. The symposium took place from
Dan Sperber
If you are reading this
text, chances are that you use spoken and written language with the same ease. You
and I live in environments where language is omnipresent in the form of either
acoustic or visual stimuli, and everyday we are likely to be processing more
written text than spoken text. We tend to value the ability to read and write
as much we value our more basic perceptual and motor abilities. We see literacy
as essential to self-realization. We easily forget that writing is a recent
invention in the history of Homo Sapiens, that universal literacy became a goal
only a few generations ago, and that this goal is far from being achieved. Even
when we do remember that writing is recent and that widespread literacy is new,
we take it for granted that they are here to stay. Well, are they?
The most controversial
thesis I will defend here is that the revolution in information and
communication technology may soon turn writing into a relic of the past: it
will be replaced by the automatic transcription of speech - whereas
reading is here to stay. My aim, however, is not to prophesize, but to reflect
on the future with the help of tools developed within the cognitive and social
sciences.
However controversial this
view, I should point out that an even more radical claim has been made
elsewhere: it is that both writing and reading will soon be things of
the past, a cumbersome pair of prosthetic practices that, in retrospect, will
come to be regarded as a mere parenthesis in human history. This has been
argued in particular by William Crossman: "By enabling us to access stored
information orally-aurally, talking computers will finally make it possible for
us to replace all written language with spoken language. We will be able to
store and retrieve information simply by talking, listening, and looking at
graphics, not at text. With this giant step forward into the past, we´re about
to recreate oral culture on a more efficient and reliable technological
foundation" ("The Coming Age of Talking Computers", The
Futurist, Dec. 1999). I argue, however, that there the is a relevant
asymmetry between writing and reading that should ensure the survival of the
latter.
The past and the present
Before taking a peek into
the future, let us look at the past and present. In most of the human societies
that have ever existed, children became competent adult without the help of any
formal teaching. They acquired language, knowledge of their natural and social
environment, techniques, rules of etiquette, tales, songs, and other cultural
competencies without any formal training or schooling. They may have been
helped by advices and corrections of adults and other children, but such
pedagogical assistance comes in support of a spontaneous process of
acquisition, and is very different from institutional teaching. Institutional
teaching typically serves to transmit knowledge and competencies that would
hardly ever be acquired spontaneously, and that therefore, if they were not
systematically taught, would be unlikely to emerge and stabilize as elements of
culture.
Particularly striking is the
contrast between the acquisition of language and that of writing. In ordinary
conditions, language acquisition occurs spontaneously in every child at a very
early age. Pedagogical assistance (which is virtually absent in some societies)
plays at most a marginal role. By contrast, writing and reading are acquired,
if at all, through a lengthy and intensive process of deliberate training in
interaction with a teacher. Is it that writing systems are more complex than
languages? Quite the opposite. A language such as English, Amharic, or Chinese
is a much more complex object than an alphabetic, syllabic or even a
logographic writing system. In fact, linguists have not yet succeeded in
providing a fully explicit grammar of any language, whereas writing systems are
based on fully explicit rules. The remarkable difference in the patterns of
acquisition of language on the one hand and writing on the other hand has to do
with psychological predispositions: humans are predisposed to spontaneously
acquire the language of their community. They have no such predisposition for
the acquisition of writing. It is writing systems, rather, that had to adapt to
human perceptual and motor predispositions that had emerged well before the
invention of writing. How is it, given these conditions, that writing systems
have emerged, spread, and stabilized at all?
Writing did not emerge as
the commonly shared ingredient of culture that it has now become in modern
societies, but as a specialized skill, practiced by professional scribes in the
service of the State. Specialized skills emerge because the demand for the
products of these skills is sufficient to cause (either through economic
motivation or through coercion by the end-users) a minority of people to become
specialists. The cognitive difficulty involved in the acquisition of such
professional skills is overcome, within the small group of specialists, by a
heavy investment in training apprentices. Teaching the skill typically becomes
the subject-matter of a second-order, didactic skill.
The development of writing
resulted in the accumulation and diversification of written texts. This,
together with correlated economic and political transformations, caused the
costs involved in acquiring literacy to become lower than the benefits of
literacy for an ever-increasing proportion of the population. In modern society
the benefits are greater than the cost for the majority of the population, and
illiteracy has become a stigma and therefore a cost in its own right.
There is another important
factor that helps explain the generalization of literacy. Once the skill is
properly acquired, writing becomes a kind of automatism: one can write without
paying any conscious attention to the hand movements involved (and this is true
of typing as well). Similarly, for the proficient reader, reading is just
another form of automatic visual pattern recognition. Most earlier forms of
writing, such as Sumerian cuneiform with its relatively cumbersome materials
and tools, did not lend themselves to a similar kind of fluency.
Thus two facts explain the
spread of literacy: the fact that the benefits became, for more and more
people, greater than the costs; and the fact that, once the initial costs of
acquisition of the skills are paid, the costs of using these skills are
comparatively negligible. These two facts are linked. If the distribution of
costs and benefits over the life span of individuals were more even, or, in
other terms, if the marginal cost of writing and reading did not dramatically
drop with proficiency, then people would read and write much less. (This
incidentally, was the situation when writing had to be done in stone or in
clay.) With a less frequent use of writing and reading, there would be fewer
written texts to read, and fewer people disposed to read them. As a
consequence, the benefits of writing and reading would be smaller, and might
not compare favorably with the costs, except for a small group of professional
scribes. Actually, once learnt, writing and reading are easy and generally profitable.
The greater the number of people who read and write, the greater the benefits
involved in being able to do so oneself, and the greater the motivation in
having one's children acquire the skills. How then could the future of writing
and reading be in doubt? The short answer is that writing is not the only way
to produce written texts.
Until recently, many rich
or powerful people would dictate to a secretary rather than write themselves. Some
literary and historical works, such as Milton's Paradise Lost or
Napoleon's and Las Cases' Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène were dictated. Dictating
may be advantageous for reasons of speed, or it may be a matter of necessity as
in the case of the older Milton, who had lost his sight. Still, if given the
choice, most of us would rather write than dictate. The main reason, I presume,
is that when you dictate you have much less control over your text than when
you write. In any case, traditional dictation was a form of division of
scriptural labor, not a way of rendering writing altogether obsolete. Now,
however, the new information technologies are about to provide a novel form of
dictation without the shortcomings of the old, and in such a way that the
division of labor will not be between employer and employee but between people
and machines.
Speech recognition software
that provides speech-to-text conversion has been rapidly improving over the
past few years, allowing one to talk in natural continuous speech at a
conversational pace and see one's words appear on the screen. At present, the
rate of error is still too high, the program requires initial training, and
many users who don't really need such a program get discouraged. I take it for
granted, however, that these shortcomings will be overcome and that, in a
matter of years, it will be possible to speak normally, have the machine
transcribe one's speech with very few errors while distinguishing, in the flow
of speech, instructions (e.g. "underline!") to be obeyed from data to
be transcribed. It will become easier to dictate to a machine than it ever was
to dictate to a secretary. More generally, it will be easier to give
instructions to the computer (and to all kinds of appliances, vehicles and
other machines) orally than through keyboards, mice, and other manual devices. Machines
will be able to provide information orally rather than through screens. Thanks
to progress in text-to-speech technology, machines will be able to read aloud
written texts, in a quite natural sounding voice. Natural language oral
interactions with machines will become the norm rather than the exception.
However imperfect at
present, these speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies are already
transforming the lives of people who, because of visual, hearing, or motor
impairments, or because of dyslexia, have difficulties writing or reading. The
obvious reason why millions of illiterate people around the world don't also
take advantage of these technologies is just poverty - which explains why
they are illiterate in the first place.
Soon, then, the costs and
benefits or writing and reading will be compared not just with those of
illiteracy but also with those of alternative ways of creating and accessing
texts, provided by new technologies. How may this affect the future of writing
and reading?
Individual choices
Whereas speech is an event
unfolding in time, a written text is an object with a greater or lesser
permanence in space (greater when engraved in stone, lesser when chalked on the
blackboard). Because of this difference in their temporal and spatial mode of
existence, speech and writing are suited for different uses. The development of
writing has not resulted in the decline of speech. I know of no evidence
showing that speech is less used, or less well used, in literate than in
illiterate societies. If anything, the opposite seems to be the case. The
development of writing has resulted rather in the emergence of new uses of
language, in larger and denser social networks, and therefore, also, in new
opportunities to use speech and greater sophistication in the art of speech.
What will happen if
mechanical speech-to-text and text-to-speech conversions now become ordinary
tools in the process of communication? Will they cause the emergence of
additional uses of language, as was the case with writing, or will they
displace writing as a tool, and, if so, with what consequences? It is important
here to distinguish the activity of writing (handwriting or typing), the
written text, and the activity of reading. If speech-to-text conversion were
used systematically and text-to-speech conversion only occasionally (a
plausible scenario), this would be the end, or at least the marginalization, of
the activity of writing but neither of the written text nor of the activity of
reading. If text-to-speech conversion were used systematically and
speech-to-text conversion only occasionally (a much less plausible scenario),
this would be the end, or at least the marginalization, of the activity of
reading but neither of the written text nor of the activity of writing. If
both speech-to-text and text-to-speech were used systematically (Crossman's
prediction), this would be the end of both the activity of writing and that of
reading and therefore of the written text: machines would use machine language
to encode appropriate information for conversion from and into speech; these
machine language encodings would not look like our written texts, and, anyhow,
would not be seen, let alone read, by anyone.
Whether or not societies
end up replacing writing and reading with conversion technologies will not
directly result from a collective decision based on a vision of the societal
consequences, but from the accumulation of individual decisions. To what
extent, then, are individuals likely to adopt these new technologies?
Speech-to-text
conversion
How well could individuals
achieve, by means of speech-to-text conversion, the various goals they pursue
in writing texts? At first blush and in general, what can be done with a
written text does not depend on whether initially it has been handwritten,
typed, dictated to a secretary, or transcribed by a machine. The few exceptions
- olograph wills and scented love letters for instance - are no more
obstacles to the generalization of speech-to-text conversion than they have
been to the generalization of word-processing.
For an individual, choosing
to produce a written text by means of speech-to-text conversion rather than by
one or another form of writing is not going to be such a momentous decision and
will be determined by considerations of practicality and taste. Speech-to-text
conversion has one obvious and truly major practical advantage over writing:
speech is several times faster than hand writing or even typing. It has one
obvious practical disadvantage: speech is noisy and could not comfortably be
used as a method for composing texts in most work, classroom, or even home
environments of today. However, if speaking turned out to be a much more
effective mode of producing written texts, working space could be reorganized
(or maybe noise could be selectively controlled by means of yet other new
technologies).
The main argument that may
come to mind in favor of keeping up the activity of writing is not so much
practical as it is intellectual. Writing allows one to express one's thought in
a richer, subtler and more controlled way than speech. Writers can write,
correct, rewrite and, in the end, produce a text free of the hesitations and
repairs of oral utterances. The stylistic richness and specificity of the
written text comes from the exploitation of these possibilities. Note however
that these possibilities result not from the activity of writing per se, but
from the fact that writers can read what they write as they write it. Imagine
that, as you write, you could only see the words you were writing, and that
once written they would become invisible and unerasable: then all the stylistic
advantages of writing over speech would be lost (and worse: since writing is
slower than speech, the amount of text that the writer could hold in short term
memory would be smaller, so that writing would produce shorter and simpler
sentences than those produced in speech). Imagine on the other hand that what
you dictated to a machine could immediately be read on the screen, and that,
moreover, it could be easily corrected by means of oral commands (and maybe of
some manual commands too): this essentially oral interaction with a machine
would offer opportunities of stylistic elaboration identical to those of
writing. The creative potential of writing does not come from the movements of
the hand but from those of the eye. In other words what makes the process of
writing uniquely valuable is the simultaneous reading of what you write.
There is an important
aesthetic reason to prefer speech-to-text conversion to writing. However used
we may be to moving a pen over paper or to pressing keys, speech is much more
natural. At first it will seem awkward to dictate to a machine, but once the
awkwardness is overcome, it may become an extraordinary relief to be free from
the artificiality, the muscular tension, the fidgetiness of writing and to hear
the sound of one's own voice as one expresses oneself through language. Once it
will be possible to by-pass writing, many people may come to realize what a
source of discomfort it always was to them.
If speech-to-text
technology proves effective and congenial, people may end up giving up writing
altogether without ever deciding to do so or even noticing that they have done
so (just as many of us have, in fact, ceased to write by hand).The cumulative
effect of such individual decisions at a cultural level is hard to predict, but
it is likely to be considerable.
Text-to-speech
conversion
Text-to-speech conversion
is a way to have a written text read to one instead of reading it. Just as some
wealthy or powerful people have used secretaries in order to dictate and not to
write themselves, so they have had texts read to them by hired readers. What
you get from a text read to you is different from what you get by reading it
yourself. The tone of voice of the reader contributes to the way in which you
interpret the text. In some cases - an actor reading a poem, a mother
reading a story to her child - being read to may be wonderful. But in
general, we would rather interpret what we read in our own silent voice. Moreover,
we may never grow fond of the tone of voice of a computer and we may remain
justly reticent to be influenced by it in our interpretation of a text.
Whereas it may be
pleasurable and even illuminating to hear a narrative or a poem read aloud,
there are other kinds of texts that are much better comprehended when read
alone. Such texts are typically written to be silently read, and are hard or
impossible to follow when they are listened to. Anybody who has been bored to
death by a scholar reading aloud a written lecture knows what I am talking
about. To understand why this is so, consider the role of short term memory in
comprehension. In the process of listening to speech (whether spontaneous
speech or the reading aloud of a written text), the information given by every
spoken sound must be attended to and retained in short term memory long enough
to allow linguistic decoding, or it is lost (although some of it can be
reconstructed from the context). Not so with reading: the written text provides
an effective external short term memory store that can be scanned back and
forth. This allows readers to follow the text at their own pace as opposed to
listening at the pace of the speaker. Readers can first skim the text and then
peruse it. They can choose to go back to some earlier passage if they
retrospectively become aware of its relevance, or in order to check the
consistency of the text. When you read, you loose the extra input provided by
tone of voice and gestures, but you gain in the range and depth of what you are
able to comprehend and extract from a text.
The fact that readers can
see a whole page and readily access any other part of the text provides writers
with opportunities not shared by speakers. Writers can use more complex
sentences. They can highlight the organization of their text with paragraphs,
titles, and subtitles. They can depart from a strict linear organization of the
text by adding footnotes, cross-references, or appendixes. They can produce new
kinds of objects that are at once linguistic and graphic, such as structured
lists and tables. Even in oral presentations, most teachers and lecturers have
found it useful or even necessary to provide written text and other graphic
documents for the audience to read or examine, in the form of writing on the
blackboard, handouts, or, by now, screen projections. Many of the current forms
and functions of writing take advantage of the short-term memory effects of a
visual presentation. Possibly, some of these functions could be fulfilled by
talking machines, but not all of them. For instance, it might be easier just to
ask the machine to read a short dictionary entry than to look it up using the
alphabetic order. On the other hand, browsing is, and is likely to remain, more
effective when done visually than acoustically.
From a practical point of
view, listening to a text is much slower than reading. It is also noisier (but
this can be easily corrected with headphones). Possibly the stronger obstacle
to the abandonment of reading is the role it plays, not in accessing texts, but
in producing them. As I pointed out, what we rightly value most in the activity
of writing is not the hand movements (or else typing would not have replaced
handwriting to this extent) but the fact that we can read what we write as we
write it.
All this considered, it is
quite implausible that the cumulative effect of individual decisions to use
text-to-speech conversion will result in the replacement, at a societal level,
of the activity of reading by the systematic use of text-to-speech technology.
Cultural implications
I have attempted so far to
develop the following argument: practically all the benefits that seem to come
with writing and to justify investing so much resources into teaching the skill
are, in fact, benefits derived from reading. Even the apparent expressive
advantages of writing over speech come from the fact that, as you write, you
read what you are writing. Writing is essentially a cost paid in order to be
able to profit from reading. This cost was unavoidable, and it still is
- but not for very long now. As soon as technology will make it possible
to see one's speech properly transcribed as it unfolds, and to modify the
transcription by means of oral instructions (and also, probably, of pointing
and highlighting hand movements), writing will present no advantage that is
sufficient to justify its cost. In contrast, having a machine read aloud is in
most cases less appealing than reading on one's own.
The cumulative effect of individual
decisions to use these new technologies will soon bring about, at the societal
level, the near disappearance of writing, whereas people will go on reading. The
individual decisions I am talking about will be made by people who will already
have paid the main cost involved in writing and reading, that is, not the cost
of using these skills, but the cost of acquiring them. Even with this cost
paid, it will become preferable to move to the oral production of written
texts, just as the fact of having learnt to write by hand is not stopping most
of us to write almost exclusively with a keyboard.
Once writing isn't
practiced anymore (except by calligraphists), what will happen to its teaching?
Whatever the tongue and the
writing system, the teaching of writing always involves an overcost when
compared to the teaching of reading. Reading can be taught on its own, whereas
the teaching of writing presupposes that of reading. Since the teaching of
writing and that of reading have been systematically linked, we have no
controlled comparison that would allow us to estimate the overcost involved in
the teaching of writing proper. Moreover, even a controlled comparison would
not really allow us to estimate the economy of effort that would result from
teaching children just to read, for all past and present pedagogies (with very
few exceptions, such as cases of students with specific disabilities) aim at
jointly teaching both skills. If reading were to be taught on its own, the
pedagogy would have to be rethought, and particular attention would have to be
paid to the role that computers could play in it. It is quite conceivable that,
using the new technologies, reading could be taught on its own in a much more
intuitive and easy way than the reading-writing pair.
Does all this mean that,
once writing will have been replaced by transcription, only reading will be
taught, and that the resources thus freed (children's, teachers', and parents
time) can be used otherwise? Certainly not. Such a cultural transition is a complex
process and meets various factors of inertia.
In developed countries, the
people who might have the greatest interest in the demise of writing, that is
children, are not in a position to judge, and anyhow won't be asked. The first
generations of adults who will move to dictation after years of writing will
already have paid the price of learning. The fact of having paid the price, the
familiarity with the practice, the absence of distinction between the teaching
of writing and that of reading, the contempt or the compassion for illiterate
people, all these will converge and make these adults fervent defenders of the
teaching of writing. Teachers trained to teach writing, and who often do it
with outstanding dedication and patience, will be reluctant to admit that all
this knowledge might be outdated. One easily anticipates passionate pleas and
diatribes of defenders of writing, who, even though they won't anymore be
practicing writing themselves, will feel that they are defending culture itself
against, worse than illiterates, henchmen of illiteracy. One may assume that
the teaching of writing will long outlive its obsolescence.
This scenario, where
writing remains among us as a compulsory scholastic activity, is not the only
plausible one. It ignores various factors that could tilt things another way. Teaching
in general is likely to undergo radical changes as a result of the development
of the new technologies. The acquisition of reading skills might take place
earlier and more spontaneously thanks to the interaction with machines, this
resulting in a de facto dissociation between the teaching of reading and that
of writing. Writing might end up playing a major role only in writing classes
and being less and less used in the teaching of other subject-matters. In such
conditions, the teaching of writing would rapidly loose much of its
significance. New generations of adults could be tempted to grant it fewer
resources and to render it optional.
Even this modified scenario
does not take into account the diversity of situations across countries. In
many countries, most of the resources for education are invested in the
teaching of literacy, and the illiteracy, at least partial, of a great part of
the population is a major obstacle to economic development. In such countries,
the use of speech-to-text and also text-to-speech conversion technologies, if
their cost were sufficiently lowered, might turn out to be an outstanding way
of accelerating both the social promotion of individuals and collective
economic development. If so, in these countries, education will have to be
rethought on a new basis: while, at present, writing skills occupy center
stage, they might in the future be made almost redundant.
Even if it resulted from
the accumulation of modest and sensible individual decisions, the
marginalization of writing and of its teaching might well have major cultural
effects. These effects are hard to foresee at present. It is all too easy to
speak of a return to orality. The most profound effect that writing has had on
human civilizations has been to allow them to become truly cumulative instead
of evolving forever within the limits of human long-term memory. Far from
reversing these effects, the new technologies allow new forms of cultural
accumulation as well as new ways of mining the accumulated information.
Still, the generalization
of the oral production of written texts is likely to have significant effects
on the texts themselves. These effects might be on the subtle rather than on
the dramatic side, and be therefore comparable to the effects of the
progressive replacement of handwriting by typing, and then of simple typing by
word processing. This move has favored the emergence or the development of new
styles and new genres in a way that has not yet been systematically studied. The
composition of written texts by means of the voice might have deeper effects. Various
forms of writing have resulted in some degree of divergence (varying from
tongue to tongue) between oral and written dialects. Will a return to the
natural organ of linguistic expression put an end to this divergence, or will
it cause the emergence of new dialects?
The very symbols used in
the different writing systems result from a compromise between the needs of the
hand and those of the eye. Printing, and now the computer, have made possible
the development of new characters which, however, must still remain similar
enough to handwritten ones. This constraint could altogether disappear; a new
evolution of writing systems could emerge, exclusively guided by considerations
of visual ergonomics and esthetics.
One can imagine anything. On the other hand, to speculate in a manner that is both informed and reasoned is difficult. Difficult but not altogether impossible, I hope.