There seems to be a fairly sharp shift developing in the ways people communicate. Some things will surely remain, but a lot of the details are subject to radical change. The head stays the same, but the hair style and colour are very much a moving target. The part that remains true is that it's always going to be important to speak well, to use the language compellingly.
What that means, from one decade to the next, is up for grabs. Where it used to be vital to write a neatly crafted sentence, and occasionally turn your hand to verse or song, it's now probably more valuable to make yourself clear quickly in a text message or a tweet. They used to say that poets were the unacknowledged legislators, but really, it's the people who best express what we're all trying to say. It used to be poets, now it's copywriters, song lyricists, and the masters of the "sound bite." [Ask not what your speech writer can do for you.]
Of course there are good and bad things about this. Epigrams have been around since Graeco-Roman times, but they haven't stopped people writing long and elaborate essays, sagas, novels, texts and encyclopedias. Marcel Proust, who could devote a whole volume to a single personal moment, may have been a unique product of the nineteenth century, but you can still find authors who simmer themselves for hours in a single instant. Much great literature has grown this way – from James Joyce to Henry Miller to Samuel Beckett, and I blush to say that I can't name the newer ones, though I know they exist.
There will always be a place for the considered elaboration and discussion of any subject that isn't trivial (and even, perhaps particularly, for some that are). It's a cinch these things won't travel by Twitter. We in the newspaper business consider it one of our strengths, and bookstores continue to attract customers, too. But the internet also provides plenty of scope for the verbose – look at all the discussion forums and research tools and backgrounders and downloaded .pdfs and…
Just as TV never displaced radio the way it expected to, the simpler media will always have a place. No matter how many wonderful devices you can now carry in your pocket, great ideas will probably continue to be written longhand, or drawn, on napkins.
But just as radio, though it didn't die, changed radically under pressure from the new medium, newspapers and books will get blown far from their original course by the new media and we may join the pencil scribbles on envelopes as primitive but still very real. [What will we do when there are no more envelopes? Back to napkins.]
Are we learning yet to incorporate pictures into our words? Technology is making it easier and easier to do so; you can take a picture on your small portable camera or even your phone and add it seamlessly into your words, and it's supposed to be worth a thousand of them. How many of us can use them with the skill we've had to learn with words? And as for making good use of video — well, let's just say there are probably more fluent speakers of Portuguese in the area.
Make no mistake; there are young people alive today who will grow to think our use of hard copy [even napkins] as quaint, and who will incorporate pictures in their communication seamlessly and unambiguously, and who will, without thinking it special, be able to put together and circulate a video report as easily as we now craft a word report. [And just like today, there will be people who couldn't do it to save their soul. but that's another story.] At this point, the software, the potential, is so far advanced over the routine usage that we can only guess what will become conventional. It won't do you any harm to keep practicing, though.