The future of text and voice

"The future is text-based." D. Keith Robinson ("Things I've Learned From Blogging" at Asterisk)

"Over time we will be transitioning to a verbal society." Thomas Frey (Trend # 6 in "The Future of Libraries: Beginning the Great Transformation" at The DaVinci Institute)

One of these two guys is wrong. Actually, I suspect they both are. As the great Walt Crawford teaches us, most of the time the answer is "and not or." (Here's one and here's another).

The Robinson quote came via Angel's "What have I learned from blogging?" post on The Gypsy Librarian. I came across the Frey quote when Bernie Sloan posted the link on several list servers that I read. The most active discussion that I saw was on jESSE, the list server for LIS faculty (which I recommend, by the way--it's generally quiet but when discussions get started they get very interesting and there is less of a technology centeredness to it all than most of what comes through my Bloglines account or other discussion lists).

One of the things the professors pointed out about the quote above is that Frey probably meant "oral" not "verbal." I played around with some dictionaries to see why that is so. "Verbal" seems to be about words and so doesn't distinguish itself from text. When it does refer to the spoken word, it's only about the speaking half of the communication, not the listening half. "Oral" is the word for "Of or relating to communication by speech." (from the on-line Oxford English Dictionary that I access through St. Louis County Library)

Inexpensive, accurate voice input will be useful in many situations--to start with, it will be a boon to people with certain disabilities. I speak faster than I type--and I'm a fast typist (thanks to my typing teacher, Mrs. Boehringer, who taught in a classroom with half manual and half electric typewriters--we switched off during the semester). But, with a computer, I correct my mis-typings faster than I can imagine correcting mis-speaking or the computer mis-hearing me. Ingbert Floyd wrote on jESSE an amusing creation of what editing by voice might be like:

"no, not that 'and', delete the one, uh, one, two, three before it...yeah, that one...and replace it with a comma"

To follow Walt's "and not or" credo, it's very easy to imagine using voice input with keyboard editing. I still use one of those cassette recorders with the tiny tapes to record thoughts while I'm driving long distances. Most of those thoughts eventually get transcribed onto my computer in the form of To Do lists and files of ideas for papers. Even a badly done automatic transcription would be better than the time it takes to listen to the tape and type what I hear.

David Bigwood at Catalogablog points out that wide use of voice input would make a noisy world. "And you thought mobile phones were a disturbance."

The other half of oral communication is the listening part. When I read Thomas Frey's trend, it reminded me of something that Jessamyn West of librarian.net wrote about podcasting: "I would have rather read it quickly than listened to it slowly." I read much faster than anyone speaks (and if someone did speak as fast as I can read, I couldn't comprehend it). If we transition to an oral society, life is going to get very slow--and that's not a direction that I have ever seen American society take.

The consensus on jESSE about Thomas Frey and his "The Future of Libraries" is that you really ought to be aware of the past and present of something before you try to write about its future. For example, "Trend #10 - Libraries will transition from a center of information to a center of culture" doesn't seem very new when you think about the many Carnegie-funded, community-matched libraries at the turn of the last century. My small town library had been a center of culture since it was built over a hundred years ago.     #

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