By Josh Siatkowski | Staff Writer
Writing, as it tends to do throughout history, is undergoing another seismic shift. For the younger generation, media is now prepared on screens that produce images and videos in psychedelic pulses of color. Businesses, too, are trimming their word count. With data production doubling almost every year and the insights from quantitative analysis obvious, companies have replaced long memorandums with graph-filled slideshows whenever they can.
Many places that once relied on words now use easily digestible visuals instead. And for the things that still make more sense in writing, there’s now a tool that does it for you.
These trends might suggest that the world reads and writes far less frequently than before, and that the skill of written composition is becoming about as relevant as a steamboat license. Don’t get me wrong, some statistics back that notion up. Literacy among high schoolers is at a 30-year low, and Americans are reading fewer books than they were even four years ago.
But the notion that writing cannot keep up with the changing world of communication is false. Short-form video content, improved data visualization and generative AI are just a few more items on a long list of technologies that many feared would destroy the world of writing.
The invention of television, radio, the typewriter and the printing press were all received by some as threats to the longevity of original written composition. Even back in the days of Socrates, some feared writing itself, worrying the introduction of the tablet would ruin one’s ability to think on their feet.
Almost every time a new frontier emerges in the world of communication, there are those who mistake revolution for apocalypse. Instead of ending the need for original thought, each technology has merely changed the way thought is expressed.
The same is true today. While the world has largely shifted from reading stories to watching and listening to them, people still read to help make sense of the media they consume. Even in our digital world, writing appears in the form of captions, subtitles, voiceovers and comments — all of which creators say are especially important.
Even as quantitative information rises to the gold standard of decision-making, data alone is not enough. A researcher with transformative experimental results is only part of the equation for progress. The articulation of that data, no matter how strong our love for graphs and metrics grows, is worth very little without an explanation and context. And when pressed with questions and pushback in the moment, an AI-written report is rarely a sufficient defense.
Just as the rest of the world does, writing will continue to change. But if its 5,000-year life tells us anything, it is that writing has endured change before. From wax tablets to typewriters, from ancient Greek to modern English and from the Bronze Age to the digital one, verbal records composed by humans have withstood the test of time.
Writing is not merely hanging on despite repeated attacks by the changing world. It’s progressing in tandem with each breakthrough, acting as a necessary component of our technological and communicative revolution.
