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This book asks what will happen to thought and communication as written communication gives way, inevitably, to digital expression. In the introduction, it 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. The balance of this book teases out the nuances of these developments. To find a common denominator among texts and practices that span millennia, the book looks back to the earliest forms of writing and forward to the digitization of texts now under way. For this book, 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, it argues, the art of writing will not so much disappear but rather evolve into new kinds of thought and expression.

Poised between hope and despair for a humanity facing an urgent communications crisis, this book forecasts either the first truly human, infinitely creative society in history or a society of unbearable, oppressive sameness, locked in a pattern it cannot change. First published in German in 1985, this book outlines the history of communications technology as a process of increasing abstraction. The book charts how communication evolved from direct interaction with the world to mediation through various technologies. The invention of writing marked one significant shift; the invention of photography marked another, heralding the current age of the technical image. The automation of the processing of technical images carries both promise and threat: the promise of freeing humans to play and invent and the threat for networks of automation to proceed independently of humans.