TODAY'S HANDICAP -- TOMORROW'S ADVANTAGE? 

A few years ago I mentioned that some physically disabled people might be gaining an advantage over the so-called normal's because they were being introduced earlier to new technologies as a way of overcoming disadvantages. For example many wheel-chair bound people are now physically mobile, and computer training allows them to work successfully at careers that do not require normal physical dexterity.

Something usually perceived as a disability, such as dyslexia, could be tomorrow's distinct advantage. To see the same scene more clearly, consider this:

Two per cent of the world's population is color blind, that is, about 98 percent see color. What if these figures were reversed? Then anyone who sees color would be considered "disabled" by defective vision or something worse. Like being mad.

At present dyslexia is considered a disability. Maybe it's not. Not right today, but shortly. Dyslexic people are visual in many ways like the majority of aboriginals, and today's street people. They have trouble only in a linear, A,B,C, 1,2,3 world. They don't see pictures backwards. They don't have any trouble talking.

At one time man only saw the world around him. His first drawings were animals and symbols, not strings of letters and numbers. These "more sophisticated" learning and communication tools have only been around, for large numbers of the world population, during the past 500 years or so. They served us well and contributed to our present levels of affluence and influence, creating the "civilization" we know today.

Since the advent of television, more and more of the world's five billion people have been receiving an increasing amount of information via pictures and the spoken word. In North America and the rest of the westernized world, sometimes even more in some developing countries, the visual is now out-distancing the written. Ask kids whether they prefer dull, dry, static print and math tables to the colorful, dynamic visuals of MTV.

Today there is panic in the streets over kids who can't read or write. Kids who can't fill out forms. Could it be that our understanding and modes of expression are undergoing evolution? Forty percent of North Americans are illiterate -- in the old sense of literacy. Probably 70 to 80 percent are illiterate in computer skills, a medium that until recently dealt only with numbers and letters. As more and more people are watching television and video for more and more hours than they are reading, in which medium will they become more proficient? If it is visuals, then the 40 percent illiterate in the Gutenberg sense have no handicap in this new world. The handicap reverses itself and penalizes people locked into a rigid past of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, dangling participles and contextual synapses. Would you want someone with a Ph.D. in English literature as a guide in this new world?

The same applies to dyslexics. Once considered handicapped, they have no problem with visual modes of expression that may seem unintelligible to Gutenberg intellectuals.

How can the Kayapo Indians of the Brazilian rain forest, who were never widely exposed to reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic, express complaints clearly via the latest in hand-held camcorders?

When one video clip showing beatings by the L.A.P.D., taken on a video camera by a rank amateur, results in $500 million in damage by arson and looting in one evening, can anyone really say we are not moving into another age? Have any 30 seconds of writing ever produced such dramatic action?

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