Would Socrates been a leading light on Twitter, or Shakespeare posted storyboards on Instagram? What would their fate have been and how would our thinking and culture have evolved if these giants of their time were governed by character counts and trolls?

I turned my attention to this because of a recent comment made by my Gen Z daughter. In a single sentence, she dashed the prospects for people pursuing careers like mine.

“There’ll be no careers in writing in the future,” she asserted.

Here was I thinking that the one thing artificial intelligence would struggle to do was replace truly creative writing. Sure, I could see the possibility of it reporting sports results, cleaning up legal contracts, perhaps even creating them. It had not occurred to me that a career, or even pastime, in output sourced from the almost limitless permutations and combinations of human emotion and intelligence could could be replaced by AI. How wrong I was, but not due to my beliefs about AI.

Her insight suggested that the demand for writing, particularly in its long form, could diminish to almost the point of irrelevance to a generation consuming podcasts, images, vlogs and acronyms.

“My generation doesn’t have the attention span of yours, we don’t read much and we don’t write as well because we don’t need to,” she remarked. This from a person and cohort that is atypical of the whole - post-graduated educated and exposed to tomes of research and discourse.

Rather than launching the retort that is often the reflex of a more life-weary generation tackling the assertions of the young, I elected to think about this and its validity - confronting as it was for someone whose entire livelihood has been mostly founded on written narrative.

It led me to this 2019 Pacific Standard article, There’s a crisis of reading among Generation Z. The article revealed some quite alarming research about the way in which the interaction of the young generation with digital information may affect cognitive and analytic function and, indeed, the constraints this may place on capacity to manage the more challenging technical communications that rule our lives.

But more relevant to this excursion into the topic was its confirmation of “the decline of daily reading of some form of print—whether magazine, book, etc.—from 60 percent in the late 1970s to 12 percent today.”

It helps explain the, somewhat bemusing to me, rise and power of influencers. No matter how ill-qualified or misinformed, these people are becoming the default filters for an overwhelming tsunami of information and choices, diluting the need to properly engage with issues and decisions.

There is so much information, so much choice, that the Z and future generations risk choosing the most acceptable brokers of truths rather than the truth itself. Trust does not derive from the truth, but rather from its source.

In the digital communications age, Socrates’ wisdom would have tossed and turned on a restless sea of pithy diatribe and perhaps be lost to civilisation because of a generation which “no longer has [sic] the patience to read denser, more difficult texts”.

As a philosopher and especially as a writer of ‘more dense’ texts, we may only have known Socrates for his golden nuggets of wisdom through tweets of his quotable quotes. Maybe that’s all that endures anyway for most of us?

The question is whether there will be less demand for writers in the future? Is this a concern from the perspective of Gen Z and future generations, or just a concern for the career prospects of people like me?

Every generation has its storytellers, its interpreters, its influencers, even its philosophers. Writing was the mass communication medium for Socrates. Insta, Tik Tok and platforms yet unknown will evangelise the stories of tomorrow.

Writers will have a role, but like our migration from stone tablets to paper, communications began shifting from paper to screen with the launch of television in the middle of last century.

Words, along with mathematics, will continue to underpin what we do and how we process our thinking. Their delivery will be different, often unspoken or unwritten, translated into visual, scrollable and rapidly consumed hybrids of textual and visual cues.

It is not right or wrong, beneficial or threatening. Those whose trade is language may well consider these words from Socrates: “Let him who would move the world first move himself.” Politically incorrect, but let’s leave the hazards of pronouns for a future discussion.

And yes, I think Socrates would have interrogated community preferences and ensured that he deployed his messages through its preferred channels - including social media. The media he chose would not diminish his discourse.

Photo by Gaby Baldiskaite on Unsplash