by Alan Oak, LSC member

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Endowment for the Arts shows that readership of books and other media continues to drop every year, even as the amount of time Americans spend ingesting media goes up. The only area of reading increase is in Web use. Caleb Cain, Critic at Large for the New Yorker magazine, cites research in his article, “ Twilight of the Books,” suggesting this trend will result in less literacy and change the very structure of people’s brains and thinking. How, then, will we communicate with our audience in a post-literate world?

We’ve little reason to think people will start reading more. No matter how many books get scattered like parade candy from bookmobiles, they just won’t be as interesting to most people as Halo and Lost. It’s time to get past hand-wringing and cries of woe to begin thinking about what we’re going to do. I know it’s hard. Most technical communicators are voracious readers, and I bet I can’t walk through an STC meeting without bumping into half a dozen part-time novelists and screenwriters. We’re a literate bunch. We are not the vanguard.

In the 1970s, psychological research of newly literate cultures, with a mix of literate and illiterate people, showed that illiterate people think differently. Illiterate people have difficulty recognizing optical illusions, thinking abstractly, and using conceptual categories. They don’t like understanding things through analytical and theoretical language. Instead, illiterate people prefer communicating information through stories.

If a post-literate culture grows, how will that affect what we do? Say you’re designing a Web-based help system, but the audience of the future is not able to easily use a hierarchical listing of topics and text-based advice. Does the help system rely on an artificial intelligence (AI) application that extrapolates what kind of problem a user is having from their practical explanation of, “It’s broken, and the light is off”? Does it then whisk them to a YouTube-style video telling a little teaching story, or maybe to a Virtual Reality guide of an engine with flashing colors and moving parts to demonstrate exactly what needs to be done? Do all our books and Web sites start to resemble the Sprint instruction cards Patrick Hoffman showed us in his “Intuitive Images” lecture? After all, most people will be reading English as if it’s a second language.

We’re not to that day yet, if we ever get there. Reading on the Web may alter brains’ cognitive functions in a new way. Yet there will be changes. In the meantime, the Internet communication genius, Jakob Nielson, has some great advice on writing Web content for low-literacy audiences, which is about 30% of Web users. With a little creative modeling, we can adapt his ideas for the entire 48% of the U.S. population that has low literacy. The rest we’ll have to figure out.