Would you rather be blind or deaf?

I love those classic conversation starters. Has Earth been visited by extraterrestrials? Does President Bush need to carry money? Why is it that, after making love, men fall asleep and women wake up?

Let's focus on the blind/deaf question. Genius overcomes many difficulties. As evidence, we have the pantheon of blind and deaf artists, ranging from Beethoven to Goya to Milton to Ray Charles. According to neuropsychologist and author Oliver Sacks (in his book Seeing Voices), whether it's better to be blind or deaf depends on how old you are. For an adult, blindness and deafness are about equally problematic. But for a child, there is no question: it's better to be blind. Anyone who has had the opportunity to teach a deaf child knows this. Hearing is the primary channel through which we receive language, and all of those incoming words downloaded into our brains carry a wealth of emotional and cognitive apparatus that structures and empowers our imagination. Language is the mind's opposable thumb.

Whether it is a book, a pencil or a computer, technology deeply affects the way we learn, and interact and create with, languages. The word "hello" came to prominence in English because of the telephone. Or con-sider the emergence of mass public literacy. It wasn't born in a vacuum. It is largely a technological by-product of the printing press-and it's been greatly affected by the rise of television and other media that compete for our attention. The question is, how will future information tools influence our relationship with languages?

David Sarnoff, an early president of RCA, believed that the broadcast of radio and television would spread English as the world's unifying language. It did and it does. More re-cently, the World Wide Web has further fostered English as the global lingua franca. Visit a developing country and you find that people seeking better lives see two clear paths: learning English and mastering computer skills. The two are intertwined.