Continuing my train of thoughts on competition among mediums, this is about the future of texts.

Now that smartphones are ubiquitous, it's pretty impossible to remain absolutely illiterate. For you to operate one, you'd at least have to read something.

Which is why I want to redefine illiteracy. In my updated definition, illiteracy doesn't mean not being able to read textual information, but being unwilling to read.

"Blogs are dead," so I hear from professional creators. Dead not as in gone, but dead like radio is dead. There are still plenty of incumbent radios and blogs, but it's not where new frontiers are found. People don't want to read anymore; they prefer voices and videos, that's their point.

Which makes sense. Imagine if you've never been to school or learned to read. If you can get away by listening/watching, why bother reading/writing?

Consider the business writings your co-workers have to perform. Most of them are written by people who can't write (now delegated to ChatGPT); written for people who can hardly read (subsequently summarized by ChatGPT). It's a textual circle of hell.

Most people would prefer to not write if they can get away with it. Consider many WhatsApp groups: they are made out of voice-recordings only, completely text-free. It's easy to understand why when you understand the backgrounds of the people within.

I'm obviously text-biased, all self-respecting coders are. We prefer text so much that seeing the wrong monospace font offends us. But it does not mean non-text-oriented people are lesser.

The reason mainstream education teaches reading/writing as a basic skill is because that was the only way information gets transmitted: via text. But when this fundamental assumption is broken, what would it mean?

So let's try to speculate the implications of widespread illiteracy.

Consider the upsides of audio/visual mediums. Videos/podcasts are more dimension-rich. When well-produced, information arguably digest faster. Barrier of entry for consumption is lowered, unlike readers who have to deal with inaccessible vocabularies.

There are many scenarios where the above isn't true. But I'm trying to steelman the case here. It's safe to say that accessibility is usually prioritized above all else (motivated by "what does it matter when no one reads what you produce?"). By Darwinian necessity, more reception begets more production.

Pound for pound, producing audio/visuals costs more than texts. Compare a tweet and a low-effort TikTok post. But this may change when technology progresses.

Indexing is much poorer on audio/visual. This means searching within substance remains difficult. This is not the same as a regular YouTube search (which is against the title, descriptions and transcript). In digital realm, things exists only insofar that it can be found. Text has a definite upper hand here. Again, this may change over time.

Shifting to the human-side. Let's take illiteracy further and strip all ability to read (but still completely functional within civilization). Without the shackles of linguistic limits, cognition of these people may be freed up for other utilities. If they don't have to be grammatically correct or even coherent, what would it unlock for them? I can't begin to tell if it's a gift or a curse.

So why does this matter? Picking the medium to reach the most eyeballs is the least of my concern. I'm more curious about how human consciousness would change without transmission of written words anymore.

They say "writing is thinking", it kinda implies there's hardly any thinking without writing. I want to think so but I'm skeptical (case in point, Socrates did without it). Indeed the best thinkers we have tended to write, but it is because they are limited by the mediums available to them, which ends up selecting for thinkers who are text-oriented?

In 500 years, it's not a given that text will continue to be consumed by humans. It's conceivable that reading is only reserved for APIs and human digital-plumbers. For the rest, information transmissions are best done from their faces, not fingers.

It's a shame that the illiterates can't see how much I root for them here. They would've been compelled to respond but couldn't make it pass third paragraph.