I recently stumbled across Dotsies, a website promoting a brand new, dot-based font designed (according to the developer) for more optimized, efficient screen reading. At first blush, trying to decipher the mashed-together blips feels very alien, but if you follow the tutorial below the fold, you do tend to pick it up fairly quickly (or I did, at least).

Thought experiment: what do you think might happen to rhetorical practice (written, spoken, or otherwise) if we were to abandon the Latin alphabet we’ve all known and loved for centuries and adopt Dotsies instead? What unintended effects would such a change have on rhetorical style, the way we arrange ideas on the page or screen, on the integration of word and image?

PS–if the idea of communication systems with high signal-to-noise ratios interests you, might I recommend James Gleick’s excellent book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood?