Futurists Question if the Written Word Will Survive the Next 50 Years

Bethesda, MD: Newspapers are losing readers as quickly as media companies are recasting themselves as multimedia outlets. People in the developed world are spending less time reading books and more time interacting with visual media— television, Podcasts and video games— than ever before. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read for enjoyment "almost every day" fell from 31% to 22% between the years 1984 and 2004. Meanwhile, television watching continues to rise about 3% year after year, and almost 87% of kids aged 8 to 17 now have a video game player in their home.

What do these trends mean for the art of the word and the role of text in the twenty-first century? For insight into this question, THE FUTURIST magazine went to Michael Rogers, futurist in residence for the New York Times Company, Megatrends author John Naisbitt, techno-futurist William Crossman, New Atlantis editor Christine Rosen, military strategist Edward N. Luttwak, and Peter Wagschal, author of a prescient 1978 FUTURIST article, "Illiterates with Doctorates" for their take on the rise of visual culture and the future of the written word.

According to Crossman, "by 2050, there will be no reason to require young people to learn to read and write because writing —as we know it today —will have become an obsolete technology."

This special feature is part of the March-April issue of THE FUTURIST magazine.

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