Is Literature Obsolete?

The foolish title above is not a new observation but something that has been agonized over for as long as I have been reading and probably before that. Do we live on the edge of a new dark age, where all that we have will be digitally saved perhaps, (as this as yet unread blog is saved) ,but be unfathomable to the coming generations?

Marshall McLuhan said writing was a cool medium, which forces the reader on to 'actively' recreate the content in their mind and interpret it rather than allow it to be interpreted by the media itself. That is what happens when we watch TV or movies which presents content in a way that requires little effort to comprehend.

As a keen observer of the recently-minted young adults, I see something I think is strange and relatively rare in history. In the past, technology changed slowly, where the idea of 'revolution' was Jethro Tull's invention of the furrowed plow in 1700s, which allowed farmer's sons to stand on one leg and play the flute while putting in their crops. Aside from this, the values of one generation changed very little from one to the next

I am more different from my son than my father was from me. Even though I went to college and my father did not, we still saw the world in basically the same way. We got our information from books. He had to read manuals and blueprints to understand the engines on his ships. I have done the same, even though I have made my living with computers and their networks for the last 20 years, I have related to them in much the same way that my Dad did to his ship's engines. I read manuals to understand how they work.

I recently bought an Ericsson w580i cell-phone/music play/messaging/device/radio/photo/video maker and player/ voice recorder/ and remote control stick. Its dimensions are about one & quarter inch by three inches and a quarter inch fat. I was looking through the manual, looking back at the phone, trying to figure all the short-cuts etc. My son took it and in 30 seconds, with almost no effort showed me the major features. Digital Interfaces, whether Game-Boys, Windows, MACs, KDE, Gnome, I-Phones or clock radios are his backyard.

Of course people my age have no faith in the future - as kids we thought we'd be living in the age of the Jettsons by now - but in some ways this real future is much stranger than the robot butlers and flying cars of the Hanna Barbera cartoon.

Is my son any more ready than I am for what is to come? I read Philip K. Dick in the 70's. I sort of know the transitory nature of reality, which seems to be on the periphery of what is coming. Is there any device yet than can explain that to the boy? Books still seem to hold the key and will continue to, even though fewer and fewer people will know how to 'access' them.

We did have a Dark Age within historical memory. By the time of Gregory of Tours, in the 6th Century, the beautiful logical Latin of Pliny, Tacitus and Augustine was becoming a pidgin. But that was a good thing because it led to the great vernacular Literature that is our mother's milk today. So if we do have another Literary dark age caused by this sudden techo shift, well - a thousand years isn't that long in the grander scheme of things.