I wonder if you and I and the sibling commenter are talking about
dyslexia without realising it? I don't know much about it. A friend of
mine has a similarly wired brain. Definitely there's a spectrum from
very language orientated minds to those who greatly prefer picture,
sound and face to face spoken communications. I wonder if smartphones
and iconic interaction are making us all more dyslexic?
> I wonder if smartphones and iconic interaction are making us all more dyslexic?
No. Dyslexia is an actual learning disability, it isn't a lack of skill, aversion, or a missing habit. Dyslexia causes the reader to have difficulty recognizing words by, for example, scrambling letter order, and making it harder to distinguish similar letters (eg. confusing the mirror image letters b and d, or p and q), and similar visual confusion. It has very little to do with an inability to comprehend sentences.
Smartphones have actually increased the amount of text people read and write, but it is true that for most people little of that time is spent on text in longform formats rather than texts, tweets, memes, and shorter blog posts.
Certainly people who don't read and write longer essays and similar documents habitually are less likely to reach for that sort of reading and writing as tools for thought, and may not be as skilled in their use when they do, but that can generally be remedied with practice.
But none of that means that people are 'more dyslexic'.
There are other mental configurations (like ADHD) that make digesting longform text more difficult; those can sometimes be accommodated by using different (generally more atomized) documentation formats instead of continuous longform prose. Atomized formats will generally also help non-habitual readers, non-native speakers, the young, non-experts, and so on.
Of the four documentation types (tutorials, how-tos, explanations, and reference), only one (explanation) will tend to be expressed as longform text, but it doesn't have to be. Shorter explanations, or breaking the document up into shorter passages, is often well worth doing. There is no downside from making documents easier to digest. For the other documentation types, longer passages are a bit of a "smell" that should be eliminated if possible.
As in other contexts, accommodating a broad range of ability in people produces benefits for everyone, including for those who are more able.
I'm looking for another word, that (ironically) I can't find :)
Something to mean a disposition to think and communicate (perhaps in a
superior way) without recourse to language. Non-linguistic? Illiterate?
(that sounds a bit harsh/critical). But you see the space I'm shooting
for (divorce the idea of illiteracy from "stupidity").
> As in other contexts, accommodating a broad range of ability in
people produces benefits for everyone, including for those who are
more able.
Yes, I'm all for that, minus the use of "more/less able" (and say so
in my example of "coding without code"). But returning to the OP
essay, there's a problem that the structures of business and politics,
formalisms, records, bureaucracies, project management.. are deeply
rooted in the written (and often tortuously long-form) culture that
mobile technologies, short attention spans and nonlinguistic semiotics
are supplanting.
And to me that also suggests a widening class-gap, or rather a growing
gap between modes of understanding the world that determine who are
deciders or followers. It's more to do with technology use than any
level of education or neuro-atypical "disorder" (the way you use
"dyslexia" in a strictly "medical" way.) I hope that makes sense.
Well, one angle is to qualify the use of the term "literacy", as in "visual literacy". Here is an article about the movie Pacific Rim that pointed out how much of the story (or rather, backstory) was visually communicated to audiences via production and character design in ways that entirely whoosh over the head of most viewers focused on dialog and acting:
