Automation, Writing and Voice
I could not find a widely accessible study about how much the average adult writes in a day.1 This includes text messages, perfunctory forms or notes filled in at a workplace setting, and other acts of simple literacy–anykind of writing.
In the era of person computing, wide-scale electronic writing has been around long enough to have evolved through several phases. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that the writing of emails was once considered a degrading influence on the writing ability of the average person. Now, the effect of the early internet on writing habits looks–at worst–like a mixed bag. Maybe it was even its own sort of golden age. The period when email was the king of electronic communication has been the subject of favorable postmortems and much nostalgia for more than a decade. In hindsight, the so-called “You’ve Got Mail” era (~1998-2008), when it was more common to write long and intimate communications, shared in the best qualities of the era that preceded it (what the first generation of internet users called the “snail mail” times) while adding the instant gratification and fluidity offered by instant electronic delivery.
What will be said about the everything that has passed since? To skip to the latest development, AI will have such a (potentially) profound effect that we should wait and observe instead of pronouncing.
Most of the consternation about literacy is on the reading side, but it is conceivable that writing, too, could decline to a vanishing point. Imagine a world in which texts are routinely produced by indirect inputs like mood, basic biomarkers (pulse, brain signals), or who knows what other traces in the environment and the datasphere. Writing itself is unlikely to disappear soon, but it could become a byproduct of other processes. The idea of a human “generating” writing herself could become as unusual and artisanal as the making one’s own shoes or clothes.
I don’t necessarily think we’ll get to this point. But if we ever did–I want to make the somewhat provocative and ahistorical claim that the writer’s voice is essential to what humans are, on a species level. What I mean is not that all, or even most, people have to write. But some people have to. And these individuals contribute in a major way to the picture of collective human capacity. Some talents are so transcendent that every rare individual who possesses it is a credit to everyone else.
Writers talk about “voice,” that hard-to-define texture of expression that makes a text both distinctive to an individual and readable. Voice is easier to discern in written language because a text is an artifact. It sits still and you can study it. Find the voice. But voice in writing is a metaphor pulled from oral culture. Bards and poets spoke with a literal voice, long before they had the means to record it. And the voice of the artist is just an extension of the general human capacity to speak. The distinction accorded to the writer’s voice is connected to the origins of language itself.
Every era of culture has its voice. My singular voice is cobbled together from others that gave me a starting point. They showed what is possible to say, and how to say it. I never knew most of them as individuals (or forgot who they were), but the way I write still owes its makeup to them. But while my predecessors are unknown, we still form an unbroken line of communication. I learned to write by responding to those who spoke and wrote to me. And I did not write to their writing, but to the people who wrote. Writing with a voice is addressed to a voice, both hypothetically and in the reality of what motivates people to write.
If voice is the act of communication that is implicit in all writing, I worry that automation will make that voice disappear. People will still get and share information in writing, but they will be passive recipients of the system, no longer communicating with one another. What is lost will not just be a human capacity (the capacity to discover new things through writing), but a cultural process that distributes thinking among individuals by leading them to exchange with another. What method will take the place of writing?
There was this pandemic-era study on writing behavior among children. The general problem of what humans might lose when they don’t write is getting more attention. ↩︎