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capacity to read and write. Worse still, there are whole communities that speak
languages that are still unwritten languages. People in these sorts of situations
are disadvantaged as they are pushed to the fringes of the information society.
Their inability to read and write excludes them from many vital aspects of the
life of the wider communities they live in. Consequently therefore, such people
are systematically excluded from active participation in the development
processes of both their local and global communities and their communities are
the worst for it since these people cannot fully contribute their own required
quota to development processes.
To alleviate this exclusionary condition, multilateral agencies such as UNESCO
as well as national governments and various NGOs put a lot of efforts into
improving literacy levels in various communities around the world. They
organize programs in developing writing systems for languages that remain
yet unwritten and adult literacy programs for adults who live within literate
cultures but did not manage to acquire literacy skill as children. Despite the
best of these efforts however, there are still a lot of illiterate people in our world
of the information age. It may be quite depressing but we must admit that it
would appear that the death of illiterates is still one of the primary ways by
which we are able to improve literacy in the world today.
Despite the efficiency, portability and permanence of written text as discussed
above, it must be noted that speech still remains the preferred mode of human
communication. It is the most natural way by which humans communicate.
This is easily demonstrated by the lengths to which we as humans still go in
organizing conferences, seminars and workshops to sit together and consider
issues of paramount importance based on the use of speech. These we still do
despite the near ubiquity of written text. Given this reality, we need to pause
and ask a pertinent question: if sound recording had been developed before
writing, would writing still have developed in the same direction Would it
have still grown to acquire the importance it now has in our global society of
today Yet, our present bias for writing seems to manifest as a distraction in
the ways we treat other media and modes of communication. The historical
exploits of writing and the vibrant cultures and industries that have grown
around it tend to ascribe an overrated importance to writing. For this reason,
cyberspace has so far been developed based on the importance we attached to
writing. This direction of growth of cyberspace is not inevitable and there are
viable alternatives to the heavy demand of reading and writing that cyberspace
as we now know it presents.
Cultures using languages that yet do not have writing systems and many more
that are shaped strongly by oral forms of information and knowledge sharing
would not benefit maximally from cyberspace it we do not provide alternatives
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