Siri, Alexa may have made your lives easier, but can they also educate you
High-tech digital assistants channel a very old form of literacy
Convenience is atop the list of benefits Siri and Alexa have brought to millions. But is it possible that they’re promoting literacy, too? Certainly, it’s not a benefit that immediately comes to mind. After all, we speak and Siri writes. We ask a question and Alexa enters the search terms for us. Load your iPhone up with podcasts, or ask Siri or Alexa to find you the bestseller you’ve been wanting from Audible.com, and you might never need to read a book again. With each voice-to-text improvement, we seem to be moving backward — toward a culture that relies less and less on letters or the ability to read and write.History tells a different story. As the scope for oral communication expands, we can take comfort, and some instruction, from the variety of forms literacy has taken since its beginning in the West.
Take this signature from a letter in the 15th century: It is not easy to see that this word is ‘Margere’ because the woman who wrote it, Margery Paston, was what we might now call functionally illiterate. Her signature was among the few words she ever put to paper, and she's clearly having trouble with her pen. But this signature also comes at the end of a long letter Margery “wrote” to her husband, and she wrote it, as she wrote many others, by summoning one of the male servants her family employed to act as a secretary. Other Paston women wrote in this way too. This signature could be seen as a dispatch from a culture that reproduces the nightmare of Gilead depicted in “The Handmaid's Tale”: men can write and women are forbidden to because no one even teaches them how to hold a pen. But that would be a misreading: The Pastons were middle-class and so the women in the family were able to employ secretaries. Indeed, it is in these same decades that Margery Kempe used a secretary to write what is arguably the first book by a woman in English — titled, appropriately enough, “The Book of Mergery Kempe.” She could not write, but as her achievements proved, she possessed a form of literacy. She was not alone. These forms of reading and writing can be traced back to the beginnings of literacy itself. And yet the depiction is also meant to tell us that the boy is literate. In the same way the boy learning music is playing his lyre, he is reciting the text. He is therefore “reading” the papyrus in every functional sense, doubtless because he committed it to memory earlier when his teacher recited it to him. Letters in this stage of Greek culture were a mode of record but probably still not the primary one. Homer, the greatest of the Greek poets, and the original “writer” of the lines on the papyrus, was preliterate; he could neither read nor write. He composed his poems by memory and sang them to an audience. He “wrote” and “read” just as Chaucer did. Should the connection between the spoken word and literacy really be so alien to us? After all, starting in the 1950s, basic literacy training in elementary schools in the United States has involved ‘phonics.’ And what is phonics but a way of attaching written words to the sounds they had been or could become? The theory grew out of the belief that all those lines of text on the pages of schoolbooks had become too divorced from their sounds; phonics was intended to give new readers a chance to recognize written language as part of the world of language they already knew.Siri and Alexa may not seem to answer any sort of pedagogical need (though it turns out they can be used to assist in the literacy training of those who are disabled or slow to learn their letters), but we would be making the common mistake if we failed to see them as helping us reach our shared aim. They are not providing a new form of literacy so much as they are letting us use a very old one in ways that produced some of the best writing we might ever hope to read.
ARTICLE SOURCE- BS