I am writing this blog post was just walking down the street. Well I say writing it, in fact I'm using the voice recognition software built into my smartphone. As it happens I have just come back from a meeting where lots of people were getting up and giving talks. I was taking notes on those talks, and it is very noticeable that we have a very different way of writing things down to the way we speak them out loud.
But it occurs to me that maybe this difference is something that is going to dissolve over the next couple of years. After all I have the option of either converting this into text or recording it as a voice message. Or I could even conceivably send it as a video. At the moment the choice is mine as to which one I choose to use. But it isn't much of a leap in technology for my phone to be able to record all three mediums simultaneously.
If this is the case the of which format they left to use could be in the hands of the recipient rather than the sender.
If this were the case we would have to look again at the way we communicate. We are probably going to need to evolve a style of communicating that works equally well written down, spoken out loud or in video format.
I must admit I still find it quite hard to use the text to speech feature. I am so used to using a pen and paper or a keyboard that using my voice seems completely unnatural to me. I really hate trying to compose with nothing but the voice.
But I think the time will come when people will learn not to write but to create text. Written language is simply too convenient to abandon all together, but it can certainly adapt to changing circumstances. I don't think it is too far fetched to imagine that in a few years time what we regard as good written English might be completely different to what we regard think of as elegant now.
It is quite a sobering thought to think that something as simple as a smart phone might well lead to a major revision in the way one of our most major cultural activities is conducted.
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