Our family Christmas was proba
bly typical of most around our nation — the older folks talking, the young one texting, heads bowed, eyes fixed on a hand-held communications device.
Those of us who are not of the smart phone generation, folks who did not attend grade school with a hand held computer of some type in our back pack, decry the texting generation. We say they are not socialized and will encounter problems communicating with others and perhaps that is true.
I am a “the glass is half full” type person, unusual for contributors to the Town Broadcast; most are “the glass is half empty, dirty broken and the water polluted” type folks. Complaining is easy, solving problems is difficult, but that will be a different column, this is on texting.
The vision of the future as told by science fiction writers was one with the written word obsolete. In Star Trek Captains Kirk and Picard, Mr. Scott and Mr. Spock talked to the computer and it understood them and did what they told it to do. In many other movies/TV series based in the future no keyboards were seen nor pens, paper or pencils.
Many of our schools are not teaching cursive writing any more and it is going the way of the abacus and slide rule. Many of the graduates of our schools will not be able to read the Constitution, Bill of Rights, or the other iconic documents that were written in cursive. Is that a horrible thing? Probably not, a printed copy or an audio will still teach the principles and concepts, but I like to look on the positive side of things.
The very temporary savior of the written word just may be the texting craze. The smart phone the young ones are fixed on could just as easily be used to speak into, they are telephones after all. The smart phones can be used to view movies or clips on news or You Tube videos, but the youngsters are using them to write, to type out messages and communicate through the written word. We can all hope it is not a passing fad and print is not dead, but alas the day will come when printed books will be looked upon like stone tablets are today.
If we ignore the extreme danger of distracted driving or the less dangerous distracted walking, texting should be embraced by all of us who are old farts as the temporary savior of the written word. I jumped at the chance to add a program to my computer in the early 1990s that typed out the spoken word; it was less than effective and it got tossed out in one of our many moves, but I truly believed the written word was a thing of the past. Much better technology allows us to speak into our devices and see it typed out much more effectively than my first attempt some 25 years ago. We can ask our smart phones a question and they answer by voice, we can ask directions and it will talk us through a trip from sea to shining sea.
The printed book is rapidly becoming a museum exhibit; electronic books are holding a share of the market but the audio book is steadily gaining ground.
All the tools are in place for the eulogy of the written word to be dictated into a machine. Texting just may be the savior of the last generation of Americans who actually write/type anything down on paper or on an electronic screen. Voice will be the new pen, the new keyboard, the new texting.
The old coffee cup full of pens and pencils on the desk will be replaced by a box of old phones, writing programs and keyboards. But for a few years anyway, thanks to texting, people will still communicate through the written word, and that is overall very good thing.
