Does Writing Have a Future? (Electronic Mediations) by Vilém Flusser


Does Writing Have a Future? (Electronic Mediations)
Title : Does Writing Have a Future? (Electronic Mediations)
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0816670234
ISBN-10 : 9780816670239
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 208
Publication : First published January 1, 1987

In Does Writing Have a Future?, a remarkably perceptive work first published in German in 1987, Vilém Flusser asks what will happen to thought and communication as written communication gives way, inevitably, to digital expression. In his introduction, Flusser proposes that writing does not, in fact, have a future because everything that is now conveyed in writing—and much that cannot be—can be recorded and transmitted by other means.

Confirming Flusser’s status as a theorist of new media in the same rank as Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Friedrich Kittler, the balance of this book teases out the nuances of these developments. To find a common denominator among texts and practices that span millennia, Flusser looks back to the earliest forms of writing and forward to the digitization of texts now under way. For Flusser, writing—despite its limitations when compared to digital media—underpins historical consciousness, the concept of progress, and the nature of critical inquiry. While the text as a cultural form may ultimately become superfluous, he argues, the art of writing will not so much disappear but rather evolve into new kinds of thought and expression.

Does Writing Have a Future? (Electronic Mediations) Reviews

  • Russell

    Amazing book. Way ahead of its time. Makes a powerful case to say that writing and reading is probably a dying thing and were all largely becoming illiterate towards modes of communication of the past and don't quite have a grasp on the future of communication. It's not sentimental just a powerful essay of observations and possible future paths.

  • Melissa Ruhl

    Flusser's analysis in this book is fascinating. With the rise of digital, auditory, and visual communication, the idea that writing could not have a future sure seems possible. Yet, as of now, writing is also seeing a historic flourishing.

    The one critique I would make of this piece is that it feels like it didn't need to be a book. A tight, 30-page essay would have done the trick. It could have even been a slide deck or a series of pictures...just kidding. But in all seriousness, it went a little too far down the rabbit hole at times and could have been streamlined.

  • Allyson


    http://htmlgiant.com/power-quote/line...

  • Jessica Zu

    not as classy as other 60's 70's theorists writings. Too many hyperbolic statements. even as a rhetoric strategy (eg. Machiavelli's), it's too much.

  • Shehan

    This is not a review. I don't believe I am competent enough to write a review on a work that's way much ahead of it's time and discuss ideas that's original and marvelous as god breathing life out of mud. I'll just post some of the ideas it explores in form of questions in hope that they would make someone curious to read this book which has only 6 reviews on this platform.

    Is language a creation of our consciousness or is it other way around?

    Does written language be in gratitude to a device of our creation: alphabet for it's conception or is the alphabet just the vampirc jailors of the language?

    Can we or would we have to change our very consciousness with the emergence of other devices for harnessing language?

    What would spoken language sound like without written language?

    How Gutenberg with his printing machine interacted with the very concept of Platonic heaven?

    How much do you owe to poetry for your perception of colors, sound and every other sense?

    How writing desks, pen and stationary affect writing being so poor of means of writing? And what would happen with more sophisticated means of writing?

    How would poets of the future write with these means and what will be the end product would look like?

    The list goes on and on.

    Read it. As Flusser stated here we who used to revive texts are now swimming in a sea of text. With the internet we no longer even swimming we are drowned among a storm of texts. It's hard to upon by something that will give an explanation of this ocean of text. Something that would make some sense of all the information and prophesize of a paradigm shift that's yet to occur. It will shake your very core beliefs of your very own inner thoughts whatever they are.

  • Rafael Volta

    Alucinante y bellísimo ensayo sobre el pasado, presente, futuro y no-futuro de la escritura.

    Escribimos con lo que sabemos: imágenes, audio, código alfanumérico, lenguajes de programación. No hay que cerrarse a nada, nunca dejar de aprender.

  • Hannnah Hansen

    Is language the creation of our consciousness or is it the other way around?? Also letters are vampires,,,, flusser said it not me.

  • David

    Very good, definitely recommended, but uneven compared to the other two books in the trilogy.
    The irony is that "writing" as a topic elicits considerably less power from Flusser, in his writing, than does the "technical image" in the other book: it is almost as if Flusser had already capitulated to the end of writing as a fait accompli and was wholly taken up with the emergent technical image.

  • A.

    Flusser is a brilliant thinker and writer. 'Does Writing Have a Future?' is bursting at the seams with interesting ideas. Unfortunately, the failure of this text to engage with linguistic research causes it to flounder in ignorance.