The future is text

Comments following this post by ze frank are worth reading:

... an early media company (forgot their name) made t-shirts in the early 90's. "the future is text". Of course they were right: Google. How about now? Still the future? Been reading The User Illusion by Tor Norretranders and thinking about how little info is encoded in text versus speech or video. No intonation, no smirks, unless you count the less than subtle emoticon, or perhaps a font named "Sarcasm Bold" (come on Emigre, why don't you have a series based on emotional states yet?). In any case, maybe the ambiguity is what makes text so powerful: fuzziness = a greater range of possible meanings = myths and quasi-myths that correspond to our own wishes/thoughts.