The time of the written word, on paper, is almost over. Good thing or not?

It's a given that the current generation -- and those to come -- will communicate with each other more and more via electronic devices. They do now, and there's no reason to think they won't in the future. It's easy, it's fast, and it's going to get even easier and faster. It's also going to get cheaper, so that anyone with any hand-held device can contact friends with the push of a button.
So what happens to those old ways of communicating? Paper and pen or pencil is already almost an after-thought -- if it's a thought at all . Hand-written, or even typed, letters are now called snail mail and are generally dismissed as hopelessly retro. Why sit down and write something "long-hand" that you can send by email? Why indeed?

This harks back to a couple of previous posts. One said that with every advance in technology, we lose a functionality. The other said that no one gets a handwritten letter anymore.

So what do we lose when everyone connects via digital device? Well, for one, we lose the written record, the one we can print out and save forever. Or the one written, in our own hand, on pads of paper. Generations to come may want to know what we wrote, and when, and what we were thinking when we wrote it -- and what it looked like when we applied pen to paper. (There are those who claim they can tell something about us through our handwriting, but I'm skeptical.)

If we just save it onto our hard drive, it's much less likely to be viewed, by anyone, ever, because they all have so much they've saved themselves just that way. A collection of CDs or DVDs, all those pictures of our kids or theirs: it's all probably just going to end up stored in the closet (or on our computers).

Our emails to and from loved ones and treasured friends? Poof! Gone forever, deleted by their recipients and/or certainly by their/our heirs.

Think about it: how many children and grandchildren are going to want to download pictures you have saved on your computer? Not many, I'll bet. But if you have them all arranged in a picture album, wouldn't they be more likely to look at them? Wouldn't they be more likely to thumb through a real picture album of you and your wife and those sweet babies? Isn't there something tactile that's lost when we go digital?

And how many will download emails to/from people they don't know? None. And you can't blame them. They have their own lives to live and don't have time for yours, which, by then, is long past.

Now think of yourself as a mathematician. You're trying out new equations -- jotting them down on a yellow pad -- because that's the quickest way to make your notations: pencil on paper.
You know that's the way the most important break-throughs in your field have been done in the past, so why change it now? And if you wrote it by hand on that yellow pad, you have proof that you did it. Whereas, if you put all those calculations into the computer, they could be stolen or even wiped out in a single electrical surge. Again: Poof! All that work lost.

We make notes to ourselves every day. Pick up the laundry, take the kids to soccer practice, buy some shrimp for the party, etc. How do we make these notes? We do it on sticky notes and in our own handwriting, right? And we do it with pencils or pens, on paper.

So why the big rush to communicate only via the computer? Everything we enter there is lost, or potentially lost, as soon as we write it. We do it because it's quick, and we're all in a hurry. But maybe we should slow down and see if some things that we write should be saved. For ourselves to peruse in old age, or for future generations who might want to know who we were and what we were thinking. Not everything, for sure, but some things.

An email or text message can be done in a flash. A handwritten -- or even typed -- letter takes some time. Not everything you want to convery to someone else needs to be saved -- what you're doing right now or where you are -- but what if you want to write something of substance to someone you love, without all those annoying emoticons (the smiley-faces, etc.)? Can you really text-message everyone in your life with everything you want to say?

My advice is to maintain a balance. Keep your hand-writing -- or at least typing -- skills up to date while you're perfecting your text-messaging skills. There may come a time when you need to write, at length, to a friend or family member or lover (or soon-to-be ex-lover), and all the emoticons in existence won't be enough to express the way you feel. And if later, in your old age, you want to recall what you wrote or what somebody wrote to you, how likely is it that you will still have any of that on your computer, if you have that computer at all? If you have it all stored in a box -- not an inbox --you're covered.

Just like old photos -- instead of digital ones -- it's so much easier to peruse old letters -- even journal entries or notes to ourselves or others -- when they're on paper. And more gratifying, too, especially if they were hand-written.