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Is written text doomed to die out? At first glance, this might seem to be a real possibility. Fewer people are reading books and newspapers; on the other hand, digital media are proliferating like crazy, providing us with ever more available streaming audio and video. Will we eventually arrive at a future without writing?

I think not. It is obvious to me that writing has always been a core part of who we are. It is how we have made our mark on the world, as humans. And it would take extraordinary measures, as I will explain, to exterminate written text forever.

However, it would be easy to feel pessimistic these days, in the Western world at least. A 2006 survey from the from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US found that the number of 17 year olds who were non-readers more than doubled, from 9 to 19 percent, over a 20-year period - just one of an array of disappointing results, which have provoked much comment both in the States and abroad. In the UK, which is where I'm from, a general impression seems to be that people are reading fewer books and spending more time with their TVs, computers and games consoles. Does anyone actually sit down and read mammoth novels like War and Peace or Moby Dick nowadays? Would Leo Tolstoy or Herman Melville even find publishers, were they first-time authors writing in the 21st century?

Everything is faster, briefer, punchier and more visual now. Who wants to plough through a whole textbook, when Google is a couple of clicks away? Who dusts off their fountain pen and writes a long letter when an e-mail, phone call or text will suffice? Who has time to read long bedtime stories to their kids, when ultra-condensed 1-minute versions are available? We live in an age of rapid-fire commercials, sound bites, podcasts and even SMS-style digests of classics like Homer's Iliad ("Muse, wot hapnd wiv Achilles?")

Could there come a time when none of us actually read or write anything? In 2070, perhaps all communication will be verbal or visual, with ubiquitous machines serving as intermediaries and digital storehouses of knowledge. Even technical documents could be reduced to images on screens, much like sophisticated versions of today's instructions for assembling flat-packed furniture. Is this our future?

In the short term, certainly not. Although folks are not poring through as many books as they used to, they are now reading with alacrity the thousands of online articles and blogs that the world wide web spawns every month. And they

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