Welcome to the Post-Text Future Maastricht University's Marketing and Communication Department

I’ll make this short: The thing you’re doing now, reading prose on a screen, is going out of fashion. We’re taking stock of the internet right now, with writers who cover the digital world cataloging some of the most consequential currents shaping it. What does this mean for our own well oiled marketing and communication machine? Do we still expect young people to read the crap we put in front of them?

If you probe those currents and look ahead to the coming year online, one truth becomes clear. The defining narrative of our online moment concerns the decline of text, and the exploding reach and power of audio and video. The multimedia internet has been gaining on the text-based internet for years. But last year, the story accelerated sharply, and now audio and video are unstoppable.

The most influential communicators online once worked on web pages and blogs. They’re now making podcasts, Netflix shows, propaganda memes, Instagram and YouTube channels, and apps like HQ Trivia. Consider the most compelling digital innovations now emerging: the talking assistants that were the hit of the holidays, Apple’s face-reading phone, artificial intelligence to search photos or translate spoken language, and augmented reality — which inserts any digital image into a live view of your surroundings.

 These advances are all about cameras, microphones, your voice, your ears and your eyes. Together, they’re all sending us the same message: Welcome to the post-text future. It’s not that text is going away altogether. Nothing online ever really dies, and text still has its hits. Still, we have only just begun to glimpse the deeper, more kinetic possibilities of an online culture in which text recedes to the background, and sounds and images become the universal language. The internet was born in text because text was once the only format computers understood.

Then we started giving machines eyes and ears — that is, smartphones were invented — and now we’ve provided them brains to decipher and manipulate multimedia. Suddenly the script flipped: Now it’s often easier to communicate with machines through images and sounds than through text. Then there’s the more basic question of how pictures and sounds alter how we think. An information system dominated by pictures and sounds prizes emotion over rationality. It’s a world where slogans and memes have more sticking power than arguments. Continue reading at the New York Times