At Facebook’s annual developer conference this April, Regina Dugan, head of the company’s experimental technologies division, said Facebook was working on «optical neuro-imaging systems» that would allow people to «type words directly from their brain». In the future they see people «being able to share thoughts independent of language: English Spanish or Mandarin», brain to brain via telepathic devices. «It’s not about decoding random thoughts» she said. «We’re talking about decoding the words you’ve already decided to share by sending them to the speech center of your brain.»
Facebook’s quest for tearing down the ultimate barrier of privacy (the privacy of thought) raises various ethical as well as linguistic questions. If Regina Dugan speaks of «words, transmitted brain-to-brain» she still refers to terms of literate culture. Following her rhetorics, thoughts are still encoded in words. But how will communication without writing change the understanding and use of language? Is this just the next step towards a post-literate culture? Who will define the rules and who will control the new code, the new «vocabulary»? Apart of spoken language, writing was the main medium of human communication over hundreds of years, and reading therefore the main «cognitive process» of decoding. Coding and decoding of informations, experiences, feelings etc. through written language formed the way the world is described, perceived and defined in our culture. In this issue we focus on ongoing transformations of writing and reading in the age of digitalization. How do new devices and interfaces affect the way we write and read?