I certainly hope that writing, seeing print on a page (whatever the letters/characters look like) never dies entirely. It is one thing to express ideas verbally. The minute they escape your mouth (or you hit post on most digital media), they disappear into the ether as mere ephemera. Something happens when you see ideas carefully and clearly expressed in written language. They take on a weight, a gravitas, if you will, that invites contemplation, consideration, inquiry in a way that nothing else does. This is one of the lessons of writing email that we all had to master--something in print looks a lot more serious and sounds a lot "louder" than it does when it is spoken. The off-handed quality basic to conversation is frozen out of the printed word, hence all the "smilies", abbreviations and other things we do in the "new" media to soften the impact of those weighty print words. To express serious or complex ideas requires a lot of thought, and writing them down helps the thought process. I have always discovered that when I was writing something serious--be it poetry or prose, fiction or non-fiction--I never quite knew what I had until I got it all down on paper the first time. Then, working through the ideas not merely sequentially but also spatially, I was able to forge connections, pare the sucker branches and more clearly define what I thought and how I might communicate it to others. Compared with earlier generations, we no longer know how to express complex ideas in our speaking. I sincerely hope we don't now become inept babbling tweens when it comes to the written word.