Professorial trend spotter predicts end of written word

As voice technology proliferates the era of the text may fade, author muses

WILLIAM Crossman, a futurist and an English instructor at Vista Community College in Berkeley, believes that reading and writing are doomed.

The respected scholar gives the written word until 2050 to become a curiosity of the past. Such talk may inflame those who cherish the written word and make educators shriek.

Nevertheless, Crossman believes that talking computers, which we already have in a primitive form, will be storing and retrieving information for us rather than paper and text. We’ll be talking to them and getting our information by asking questions rather than by checking our files or libraries.

Crossman, unlike others, does not wring his hands over this. He sees it as a positive.

By Francine Brevetti, BUSINESS WRITER

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