Surprise! The Written Word Is Alive and Well.

• Author: Saltzman, Joe
• Position: Internet users favor writing as method of communication - Brief Article

They didn't give the written word a chance to survive in the late 20th century. The new multimedia, digital world of the future was supposed to include plenty of dazzling images and sounds whose visual and aural environment didn't need the out-of-fashion written word. Words on paper were obsolete. Throw out all your books. The new computer-video world didn't need them anymore.

How wrong could the soothsayers be? The written word is not only alive and well, but dominating the new media with a vengeance. Never in history have so many people written so much. Billions of words are written down each day by people with access to the Internet. Millions of pages of paper are printed each day by those who want a permanent keepsake of what flashes across their computer screens.

People sit for hours reading words on their computer screens. They read e-mail messages. They read newspaper and magazine articles. They read how-to manuals, medical journals, catalogues, and advertisements. They read about their favorite movies, actors, and musicians. They find whatever they are looking for in electronic stores and auctions. They read about new worlds and old passions. They read what search engines throw out at them on every conceivable subject. The written word may be supplemented with fantastic images and audio segments, but it is the written word that is dominant. It is the written word that runs the current communication revolution.

E-mail to the forefront

When doomsayers predicted the end of the written word, they apparently were thinking too much about television and not enough about the Internet. They saw that experiments asking consumers to "read" text on the TV screen were dismal failures. No one, it seemed, wanted to sit and read written words on a TV monitor. Then computers became the modern way to communicate. People began getting messages through e-mail and began favoring e-mail over phone calls. Unlike the phone call, an e-mail message does not interrupt life's flow. It can be answered at any time--even when the sender is asleep or unavailable.

E-mail correspondence became a convenient way to keep in touch with friends, acquaintances, people we hadn't seen for decades, people just met. The written message began to be the message of choice. You could write messages when you felt like writing them and you could make them as long or as short as you wanted. The recipient could read the message carefully or scroll through it rapidly without hurting...