The End of Text as We Know It?

Image via CrunchBase

With the movement of text from paper to online, it is only fitting that text will undergo some other transformation in the future.

Already, online text is being translated into video, in order to appeal to a visually-stimulated audience. The phenomenon that is Youtube has started an incredible trend in the news media: citizen-reporting. Just look at CNN's IReport: online news has taken a turn to include (perhaps primarily) a series of viewer-generated news videos.

Video blogging (aka vlogging or vidblogging) is just another example of how text has morphed. Whereas the traditional blog medium was text, this new outlet involves the blogger-turned-vlogger to make entries via webcam.

Even the New Yorker Magazine has adapted its website to include this latest trend. A feature of the website is "The Political Scene," in which a political topic is discussed, not written about. Here, text-turned-audio allows readers of the magazine to listen to new ideas, as opposed to reading them.

So is this the end of text as we know it? Unlikely.

Although it is obviously trendy to reject text for more visual or auditory agencies, written text is still the formal and most accepted way to transfer information, whether an English paper or a company memo. Still, the adaptation of text to other medias seems likely, and should provide for an all-inclusive way to receive information.