Page 1 This article questions, "How can it be that, between 1982 and 2007, reading declined by nearly 20% for the overall U.S. population and 30% for young adults aged 18-24, or that 40 million Americans read at the lowest literacy level?... the image makers." Television, video games and YouTube to mention a few is causing this decline.¬¬ ****I believe that as new technological items come out as often as they do, it separates us from the past of pen and paper literacy to the future of something "easier". Page 2 "A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that text messaging use among teenagers in Ireland was having a highly negative effect on their writing and reading skills." ****Texting employs heavy use of acronyms to replace entire words or sentences, creating a culture of brief to-the-point communications. The electronic culture essentially killed letter writing. Page 3 "While advancement in cybernetics and the decline in literary culture appear, at first glance, completely unrelated, research into cyber-telepathy has direct ramifications for the written word and its survivability." "The advent of faster and more dexterous artificial intelligence systems could further erode traditional literacy." "As originally proposed by futurist William Crossman, The written word will likely be rendered a functionally obsolete technology by 2050. This scenario exists alongside another future in which young people reject many of the devices, networks, and digital services that today's adults market to them so relentlessly." Page 4 "AI watchers predict that natural-language search will replace what some call 'keywordese' in five years. Once search evolves from an awkward word hunt-guessing at the key words that might be in the document you're looking for-to a 'conversation' with an AI entity, the next logical step is vocal conversation with our computer. Ask a question an