This column is no exception: Writing is not only a way to communicate; it is a powerful tool for putting our ideas in order, organizing our thoughts, and taming complexity. “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say,” the American writer Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) once said. This holds true for the very subject of this article: the gradual disappearance of writing, at least in its traditional manual form, and the historic and problematic advent of artificial intelligence (AI) in the writing process.
The facts are clear. French people went from sending an average of 45 letters a year in 2008 to only five in 2020. According to a 2023 survey, 78% say they write by hand less often than 10 years ago. The spoken word is steadily displacing the written word. Audio messages (seven billion are sent daily via WhatsApp, according to Meta) are supplanting text messages, voice notes are overtaking memos, video tutorials are replacing instruction manuals and audio versions of press articles and podcasts are growing in popularity.
The decline of formal writing and the parallel rise of sometimes dictated immediate messages, customer service chats, and posts on social media raise questions about the consequences for our thinking and understanding of the world. “The way we write shapes our thinking,” notes American writer Hua Hsu in the New Yorker. Yet many students are unable to read an entire novel or write an essay independently.
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