I was taught - oh, how many misadventures have begun with those three words? But I was taught that the advent of phonetic writing was a major leap for human civilization. That is, when a script that captured phonetic values replaced hieroglyphs that captured much more complex ideas.

The rise of set of standard phonetic alphabets and writing systems were major milestones in human civilization, such as the widespread use of hieratic script in Egypt in legal and administrative documents, leaving hieroglyphs mainly for the monumental architecture.

Can you even begin to imagine the Roman Republic or the Roman Empire conducting business with a writing system based on pictograms or hieroglyphs? I can't. I can scarcely believe that they got by with their wretched numeral system as it is. Quick, what's MCMLXII minus XLII? I don't know either. (If the Romans had had a telephone system, "911" would be IXII. "Gaius Septimius! I seem to have gotten my nuts wedged in an olive press. Please call IXII, would you?")

We then added puctuation and capitalization, which are basically typesetting conventions designed to make written text easier to read, and we reached a point where we could, using but 26 phonetic symbols and a handful of punctuation marks, write literally everything that could be expressed in the English language. Everything, from the Song of Songs to Humor in Uniform, could be written with the same symbols. What made one piece of writing better than another was the grace, skill and taste of the author, not the fineness of his ability to carve hieroglyphs into limestone.

Now we're starting to back away from this elegance. Punctuation and capitalization are slowly dying out. We're starting to use non-phonetic symbols almost as though they were hieroglyphs. Who among us hasn't seen (and been chilled by) things like "c u l8r"? "L8r" is like a hieroglyph, not a word. It's a specific symbol that conveys a fairly complex meaning, but it isn't a phonetic spelling of anything. "Later" is a word; "l8r" is a hieroglyph.

Is this bad? Does it matter if people say "l8r" when texting one another or twittering or sending email? Will civilization really collapse?

Not immediately, no, but it still worries me.

It strikes me that the main discernable difference between human intelligence and non-human intelligence is that humans can write things down - to compile a body of ex libris knowledge that will persist for as long as the books persist, whether anyone remembers them or not. I don't have to remember much about Young's Modulus because I can consult a book that stores that information with perfect accuracy forever. Compare this to the presumed intellectual capacity of dolphins or whales, who may (or may not) be capable of sophisticated abstract reasoning and communication, but can't record information to save their lives. You could argue that ants do a better job of that than dolphins do; ants lay down scent trails so their tiny little brains don't have to remember so much navigational information.

Thus it seems sad to me that we as a civilization seem so eager to abandon anything like "good writing" in our quest for hipness or convenience. We take the one thing that most distinguishes us from animals - writing - and we debase it.

It's not the end of the world, but I don't like it.

What would the novel of the future look like?

foshizzle he sed l8r w/dat grl i got 2 go n8 sed y r u here she...

You'll pardon me, breathless techno-elite, but I just don't see this as an improvement.