Broader questions concerning assisted spelling

The problem posed in the spell-to-communicate approach for autism is a broader problem for all of us. We are all spelling to communicate for increasingly larger proportions of our communications with others. For all of us, this introduces the doubts that the thoughts and ideas are truly our own. The slowness of spelling things out gives the opportunity for someone or something to insert their thoughts into our consciousness. As that happens, we lose the diversity of thought we once enjoyed when we relied much more on in person verbal conversations.

Human eras defined by modes of communication

The above video presents four eras of human communication from an evolutionary perspective where there was a long time when humans only gestured and grunted, then there was a long time when humans spoke but did not write, then a long time when people wrote. The useful information is the progression of information content possible with each era. The unnecessary information is evolutionary explanation. For this discussion to work, there doesn’t have to be a specific period of time when human culture flourished with illiterate people fluent in verbal languages. There are clearly expansions of content starting with gestures, then adding verbal languages, then adding written languages. The Internet era allows us to publish and retrieve information separately from the story-telling.