Feb 1, 2015 5 min read

Today, I woke up this morning with a fearful thought: will writing disappear in my lifetime?

I don’t mean handwriting. That seems to be gone already. Schools are dropping lessons in cursive writing from their curricula, and many people my age haven’t written a letter since that last clandestine note passed to a friend in study hall 15 years ago. Now, of course, the next generation sends their clandestine communications through text or social media.

Goodbye, handwriting! We’ll miss the way you reflect our emotions in the curve of your letters: the angry slant of teenaged angst, the loopy whimsy of love. Now all our emotions are filtered out in uniform fonts.

Clearly, printed words are disappearing, too. Magazines, newspapers, pulp-scented novels — these industries are in a long, slow decline, collapsing at the feet of tablets and computers. Those who bulk up their digital presence will succeed, though, of course we expect digital products to be either free, or so cheap they’re basically free.

What I worry about, though, is even more significant than losing our ability to communicate and engage in society without devices that costs as much as our monthly mortgages.

I worry that written communication — text — will dissolve altogether. Even online. More and more, our lives are dominated by images and, worse, video. Hypnotizing, flickering images that take little effort to digest. Will there be a day that the New York Times is nothing but a series of video commentaries downloaded to our tablets?

When I woke up this morning with the thought that the love of my life (that’s writing — sorry, Neil…you’re a very close second) might one day leave, I did what anyone is the 21st century would do: I Googled “Will writing disappear?”

I learned some disheartening things (Google never sugarcoats bad news). I learned that young people increasingly communicate with selfies … that’s pictures of ones own face, taken by oneself. People are taking pictures of their own faces and sending them out to communicate emotion. When did that happen?! I’m only 31 and I feel about 100.

I learned, too, that eight percent of today’s librarians believe all written text will disappear within 50 years. While 8 percent is nothing to scream about just yet, librarians are smart people who know reading. One percent of librarians who predict the end of text is one percent too many.

I learned that “market research” finds video is 65 percent more likely to sell a product than text, and that photos and videos are shared more widely on the Internet than anything else.

We’re still early in the dying process of text and written words. Maybe if we start now, we can stem the tide.

Because when it comes to creating new works, and communicating new ideas, if we transition from text to photo and video, you’ll need a camera/smartphone/piece of technology in order to participate at all.

Already, our modern world leaves out those who can’t afford computers. As someone who has worked for a couple of literary magazines — which publish fiction, poetry and essays — I know that handwritten submissions from writers and poets are not only rare, they’re at a disadvantage when we’re choosing what to publish (the many submissions that come in online get attention first).

Now, if written texts disappear altogether, you’ll not only have to have devices, you’ll have to be tech savvy enough to use them.

In the days when humans only needed pen and paper (or quill and scroll), everyone who had literacy could write … and we were better off for it. Charles Dickens was famously poor before finding wealth in his words.

When word-lovers fall in love with writing and reading, it’s because of the pleasure found in reading between the lines, and in letting a rich description of a setting carry you away. Cinematography can be wonderful, but you’re still seeing the scene through someone else’s lens. When you read, though, you layer your own interpretation over it, and the experience is richer for it.

Plus, when watching a video, we’re passively absorbing the information the videographer wants us to see, not engaging with it.

If we transition to a visual-only society, the loudest, most controversial and most insistent voices will be listened to. Everyone else will be drowned out. The careful, quiet thinkers who want to take time with an idea will never have their (likely smarter) ideas heard.

That’s already happening in fact — with media pundits who know the way to gather an audience is to court controversy. Imagine that level of angry, unreasonable discourse times 100.

Am I being dramatic? Maybe. I hope against hope that I’m wrong, too.

Jessica Vozel is originally from Perryopolis and, after attending graduate school and teaching in Ohio, now works as a freelance journalist and copywriter in the Pittsburgh area.