The last writer

Beyond literacy

To whom it may concern (if there be any who can read these words):

I write in the waning years of the 21st century. I am the last writer I know of. Readers are few enough, mostly old people who remember being taught their letters by a first-grade teacher long ago. I remember my teacher well, and I remember the pride I took in learning to make my letters.

Reading and writing have not been taught in the schools for decades. I know this because my children, now grown and with children of their own, were among the last in their school to learn to read and write. 

The end has been coming for a long time. It began with Alexander Graham Bell and his telephone. The original purpose of writing was to freeze speech, that it might be transported in space and time. The telephone allowed speech to traverse space; no longer was it necessary to convert thoughts to symbols—written words—and send them via courier to a recipient. The thoughts could be converted into words and sent down a wire.

The end accelerated with Thomas Edison's dictaphone. This device enabled thoughts to be transmitted through time, without the conversion into symbols. I speak today, you listen tomorrow or next year.

Photography, especially in newspapers, contributed to the demise of writing. Why describe something in written words when a picture does the job more fully and succinctly?

Moving pictures, invented by Edison and perfected by others, quickly dethroned books and other manifestations of the written word at the apex of the art of storytelling. The great storytellers of the 19th century were Dickens and Tolstoy; the great storytellers of the 20th century were the likes of John Ford, Ingmar Bergman and George Lucas. 

Television eroded the written word further. No longer was a newspaper necessary to keep up with the world; scores of millions received their summaries in a half hour with Walter Cronkite and his anchorman peers in the evening.

Computers initially depended on the written word: the lines of code and output that flashed across computer monitors. But the popularity of computers exploded after Apple and its imitators replaced words with icons and replaced command lines with clicks of a button.

Social media likewise started with the word and shifted to pictures. Twitter was word-based; Instagram was image-based. YouTube and TikTok set the images dancing.

Books themselves were converted to spoken words, first by humans and then by computers. More and more “readers" were actually listeners. Authors, a few at first and then more, skipped the conversion of thoughts to print and then print to spoken words, and recorded the audio straightaway. It was as though Homer had returned to life and Gutenberg never lived.

For a time, reading remained essential to those who wanted to comb the archives of past printed works. Then came artificial intelligence, which in seconds could read all material relevant to a given query and speak a digested version at any requested length.

To be sure, writing didn't disappear entirely, nor the need to be able to decipher some of it. Signs bore printed words, although many signs employed symbols accepted internationally and trademarks identifying brands. Bar codes and QR codes enabled computers to speak to computers without human intermediaries. 

Lawyers still wrote and read contracts, although AI did more and more of the drafting and the reading. Instruction manuals gave way to videos. Written directions for getting from point A to point B were replaced by spoken commands from a phone or car.

For some years individuals wrote emails and texts. But these were increasingly populated by emojis and other symbols. Phones learned to take dictation and to read out emails and texts received.

Candidates’ names were still printed on ballots, but they were almost always accompanied by party affiliation. And since most voters voted straight tickets, they needed to recognize only the R or the D.

People still encountered printed text occasionally in daily life. But their phones all had scanners that converted the text to spoken words.

Many lamented what was being lost. When schools had stopped teaching cursive writing, parents worried that their children wouldn’t be able to keep diaries, write thank-you notes, or even think consecutive thoughts. The kids dismissed the worries, and had forgotten them by the time they had kids of their own. The kids of those kids dismissed their parents’ worries about the loss of facility in the printed word.

Bibliophiles—people who value books as physical objects—mourned the devaluation of what was important to them, as people do. But eventually they got used to the fact that when they downsized their homes, no one wanted the libraries they had spent decades compiling.

People willing to take the long view of things observed that the era of the written word was hardly a moment in the history of the human race. The first several thousand generations of Homo sapiens simply spoke to one another. For a few hundred generations, reading and writing were reserved to elites. Mass literacy awaited the printing press and even then spread across the planet slowly. In much of the world, the age of reading and writing lasted but a century or two.

And then it was gone. Older folks missed it, some less than others. People with learning disabilities or who simply had had trouble learning to read felt relief that younger generations didn't have to go through that ordeal. Reading and writing had always had to be taught and deliberately learned, in a way that speaking and listening never did for children, whose brains were wired to develop those communication skills unconsciously.

Many systems of writing had been abandoned in the past. Dozens of written languages remain undeciphered to this day. But for writing in general to fall out of use was something new.

Yet what replaced it—speaking and listening—was as old as humanity itself. I guess I should take comfort from that.