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Funny. On the other hand, I once put on a weird voice and induced my wife to ROFL by intoning a spur-of-the-moment sentence:

"We are from what you humans call The Future..."

There's a serious point lurking in the premise of the cartoon. After all, there's a recent book by Tom Wheeler -- Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War (HarperCollins, 2006).

There are multivolume collections of the collected letters of the snailmail of folks from 19th and 18th century who seemed to little more than write letters. In London, there was a time when the snailmail was not so snailish, with multiple daily deliveries, where one could send a lunch invitation in the morning, get a reply to confirm, have lunch, then send a thank you note afterwards.

Will there be lavish leather-bound editions of Great E-mails of So-and-so published later this century?

Will there be PhD dissertations on the blogs about Presidential candidates? Will anyone ever win a Pulitzer Prize for blogging? A Nobel Prize in Literature?

There is an evolution of communications technology going on, to be sure. But how bright the spectral line of Blogium?

See, for my extrapolations when Electronic Rights were seen as the cutting edge of Writers' concerns, in 1993 (only 14 years ago, which is a century in Web 2.0 time, right?):

FROM CAVE TO COSMOS

The history of authorship starts in the Neanderthal caves and ends in the farthest reaches of the universe. I divide the author's timeline into 10 steps, with the world today barely on step 6. The 10 steps are called:

(1) Cave/Fire
(2) Mousike
(3) Writing
(4) Print
(5) Cinema/Electronic
(6) Digital
(7) Virtual
(8) Neural
(9) Nanotechnology
(10) Chronotechnology

A microencapsulated description of each of the 10 steps runs
something like this:

(1) Cave/Fire: the first authors were storytellers sitting around
campfires, 100,000 to a million years ago, and their collaborators in the
transcendent Mysteries were the first painters, illuminating the walls of
torch-lit caves. Today we call the caves "houses" and the flickering
firelight comes from TVs and computers, but we have not changed very
much.

(2) Mousike: Multimedia presentations were developed in every human
civilization. Authorship and the human brain have co-evolved. In European
history, we refer to the peak of 3000 years ago as MOUSIKE, the perfect
balance in the Greek city-states of music, poetry, drama, masks, dance,
feasts, prayers, food, wine, and community spirit. Unfortunately, when
Pythagorus discovered the mathematical basis of musical harmony, music
was reclassified to fit in with the divine arts of geometry and astronomy;
while poetry, drama, and the rest were consigned to the pop-culture
ghetto. Aristotle's barrier between Poetry and Rhetoric deepened the
split, which is only healing today.

(3) Writing: from the cuneiformed clay tablets of Mesopotamia, 6000
years ago, to the Post-It notes and graffiti of today, writers have tried to
prove that the stylus, pencil, pen, crayon, chalk, typewriter, and marker
are mightier than the sword. In truth, one sword is mightier than one pen,
but when ten thousand writers band together, no weapons on Earth can
stop us.

(4) Print: invented in China, and Europeanized by Gutenberg's moveable
type, the print medium led to an explosion of books which continues today,
and the unexpected birth of magazines, newspapers, billboards, flyers,
pamphlets, and junk mail advertising. Today, a writer without a a
published book is looked on with pity, if at all. Now that celebrities have
taken over the top rung of the book best-seller charts, it's time for real
writers to move on.

(5) Cinema/Electronic: the 19th Century technologies of organic
chemistry and electromagnetism led to the dominant media of the 20th
Century: photograph, motion picture, telegraph, telephone, wireless radio,
and television. With the exception of the telegraph, strangely ahead of its
time as invented by Johan Carl Fredrich Gauss and improved by Samuel
Morse, these are all ANALOG technologies, which record and then play back
greater or lesser levels of light or sound by greater or lesser levels of
chemical dyes or electrical voltages. These technologies, not those of
aerodynamics or rocketry or nuclear physics, are what won the Cold War.
The Truth Shall Make You Free, even if that truth is distorted by New York
or Hollywood.

(6) Digital: the Digital Revolution has come, but there is not yet a Digital
Constitution or a Digital Bill of Rights. That is why we are gathered here
tonight. The simple substitution of analog recording and playback
mechanisms with digital recording and playback mechanisms has led to
quadrillions of little zeros and ones streaming through the capillaries,
veins, and arteries of the global body. Like blood cells, these endless
streams of bits move through and bring to life the capabilities of
computers, personal digital assistants, fax machines, floppy discs, CDs,
CD-ROMs, CD-Is, computer networks, computer bulletin boards, and the
growing anarchic Information Superhighway. One goal of writers, in the
digital world, is to create royalty checks that have a dollar sign, followed
by a one, followed by as many zeros as possible.

(7) Virtual -- Virtual Reality is the next best thing to being there. We
yearn to avoid the freeways, the traffic jams, the drive-by shootings, and
to leave our bodies at home while our minds -- interfaced by earphones,
data gloves, and full-color video eyephones -- range through real and
imaginary worlds populated by real and imaginary beings. In a time of
limited budget, the near future of space exploration will be robots roving
the planets and moons and planitesimals of our solar system, while
women and men and children peer though the remote TV eyes and feel
through robotic hands. Whom among us will be the Voltaire of Virtuality,
or the Shakespeare of Sensors? The Virtual world is referred to as
Virtual Reality (VR) and as Telepresence. Combined with Artifical
Intelligence, it will be known by my term: VRAI, vrai, the French word for
truth.

(8) Neural -- At one of the invitation-only hackers conferences, Timothy
Leary personally leaped to my defense against techno-skeptics when I said
that the next important computer interface had nothing to do with
keyboards, microphones, screens, or mice. I speak of Neuromagnetometry,
the direct magnetic coupling between electronic sensors and nerve
clusters in the human brain. Beyond this, some people will achieve even
higher-speed sensori-motor linkages to the digital world though surgical
implants in the central nervous system. Cyberpunk authors write of
"jacking in." Are we ready for the Jack London of jacking in, or the Jack
Kerouac?

(9) Nanotechnology -- my doctoral research, in the early- and mid-1970's,
was in what I called molecular cybernetics. Somewhat later, my
acquaintance K. Eric Drexler came up with a better title -- nanotechnology
-- and excited the academic and popular world with a fully developed
vision of sub-sub-microscopic machines and computers the size of large
molecules. Nanotechnology devices will be able to dissassemble and
reassemble matter into any programmed form desired, freeing human
beings of material poverty forever. Nanomachines will rebuild the Garden
of Eden, and course through our bloodstreams to fight the ravages of
illness and, perhaps, to make us immortal. In the global reconstruction of
dumb matter into smart matter, who will write the scripts? We will. We,
the fabulators of fantasy and the writers of reality.

(10) Chronotechnology -- finally, we will go beyond even nanotechnology
to control the fundemental structure of the space-time continuum,
mastering the technologies of Einstein and Hawking just as the electronic
age mastered the technologies of Faraday, Maxwell, Volta, Hertz, and
Edison. We will use the power of gravity, the majesty of black holes, and
the virtues of the vacuum to spread human civilization across the stars
and galaxies like grains of sand in the ocean of night. We will refurbish
the universe to our hearts' desire. And who will lead the way in creating
whole new universes? Why, writers, of course!

And that's our 10-step program, that will turn us from cave-
dwellers into gods. But it will only happen if we work together, assert
our rights together, and guide the world to an era of peace and prosperity
beyond anything that ever existed before. Today the copyright, tomorrow
the cosmos.

WRITERS RIGHTS DAY, L.A. SPEECH
by
JONATHAN VOS POST
(c) 1993 by Emerald City Publishing

Good evening: humans, corporate entities, virtual personalities, and digital beings. Welcome to the Writers Guild Theater for the Writers Rights Day celebration and acknowledgment by 14 co-sponsoring organizations: the largest coalition of writers groups in California in some 50 years....

http://magicdragon.com/EmeraldCity/Nonfiction/WritersRights.html

Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | March 26, 2007 1:10 PM

David Ng, up there in sunny British Columbia, raises a good point as to whether or not I exist. I usually do not respond directly to such hypotheses, as happened when I was designated "Greatest Nerd of All Times" [Google that]. The issue of Solipsism has been recently addressed on scienceblogs. The inverse is antisolipsism, summarized as "You exist, but I do not." My wife and son and siblings have a different slant on whether or not I exist, for sociobiological reasons.

Be that as it may:

The future of books
Not bound by anything

Mar 22nd 2007 | MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA
From The Economist print edition
Now that books are being digitised, how will people read?

http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8881446

Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | March 27, 2007 1:56 PM