Last weekend we had a fire.
Not a fire in the house, thankfully, but a fire in the garden: a wrought iron brazier full of glowing red logs.
And what did we do?
We did just what you'd expect us to do; just what humans around fires have done for at least the last 50,000 years.
We told stories.
And when we're weren't telling stories, we were listening to other people's stories.
Story-telling has been at the heart of every homosapient culture since the very beginning. It is how we passed on information, warnings and -- crucially -- ideas and knowledge.
We talk a lot in this buiness about the key job of corporate communicators, and the agencies that collaborate with them, being to tell stories. To cut through the business bullshit and find the gems; the people-based tales that show the warmth, hopes and desires that underpin every enterprise, regardless of size or sector.
Story-telling belongs to all businesses, because it belongs to all humans.
But until the advent of writing, the stories that were told, and the ideas and the knowledge that they passed on, didn't tend to get much further than the people who had physically heard them.
Then along came a disruptive technology, in the form of committing stories to papyrus, stone or paper. Suddenly ideas and knowledge lived, endured and -- crucially -- were accessible by many more than just those gathered around the fire.
During a recent business trip to Egypt, I found myself looking at hieroglyphs telling stories that were 5,000 years old. Genuinely astounding.
Caxton's invention of the printing press accelerated beyond recognition the speed at which, and distance that, ideas could travel, and so the relative impact that those ideas could have across much larger audiences grew concomitantly.
It is, of course, no coincidence that the printing press predated the Age Of Reason and The Englightenment itself. Indeed, it's probably fair to say these huge intellectual leaps forward, and the flourishing of artistic, scientific and cultural understanding that came with them, simply wouldn't have happened without it.
But printing continued to be expensive, certainly until at least the twentieth century. As a result, whilst ideas spread and took root more quickly than ever before, they still tended to be the ideas of an elite: of the educated minority, of big business, of government, of the super-wealthy.
However, the end of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first saw the dramatic erosion of the premium that print used to command. We all became accustomed to the new reality that, for very little money indeed, we could commit our own ideas - our stories -- to print.
Story-telling was seriously democratized.
There is no need to rehearse the extent to which the digital revolution has further amplified this process of "democratization." Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, mobile technology to name but a few have made all of us into tellers of stories that are both accessible by millions and should last at least as long as those hieroglyphs in Egypt.
But how many of those "stories," ideas, knowledge, whatever you want to call them, will -- in future -- be committed to writing?
Not very many at all if you believe Cisco. They say that in just 3 years' time, 90% of all consumer IP traffic will be video.
Even if we make an (admittedly cynical) allowance for this statistic suiting Cisco just fine, that is a truly incredible figure. Incredible, that is, until you look at the evidence all around us.
Writing is dying.
I'm not trying to be alarmist, or even gloomy. I just think that there is a clear trend - writing, once the 'technology' that powered human development and progress, is in the process of being superseded by a more efficient medium.
I should be clear that I have no axe to grind here, and I don't think that writing is dead (yet). It's just that I see mounting evidence of the demise of the written word all around me. Don't you?
I now use YouTube as a search engine at least as much as I do Google, and I'm not alone. Who wouldn't rather watch a video of how to, say, fix your bike, than read the manual, digital or otherwise? Moreover, video is now, legitimately, a medium that one might access on the way to, after or even during a business meeting, not just something you watch on a "night-in."
Corporate websites are full of video; and why not? I'd certainly much rather watch a video than read a ton of black and white text. And, arguably, video is more 'authentic', a sine qua non in modern day branding and communications (and a topic I have covered elsewhere on The Huffington Post).
The BBC, once the unofficial guardian of the written word in the UK, now leads most of its new stories on its site not with text but with video. Even Her Majesty's supposedly fusty Foreign & Commonwealth Office is turning to video to promote the Prime Minister's vision of UK trade overseas.
The barrier to recording your thoughts -- your own "stories" -- on video is now very very low; you just pick up a very easy-to-use flip cam or iphone. Contrast that against the barrier to entry to reading and writing, which is considerably higher (as my "ever-so-comfortable-with-video-and-voice-technology" five year old is finding out as he begins the process of learning both).
But writing's terminal illness hasn't been brought about solely by video. Voice-activated technology is now suddenly becoming the reality that has long been promised. Google just launched a 'voice-activated' search engine -- "for Africa," they say (somewhat patronizingly), but why not lazy/busy/idle/ill-educated westerners?
The iPad -- soon to be old hat itself -- is sufficiently intuitive that you don't need to read and write to be able to use it; thereby opening up technology to millions more potential "story-tellers."
The Twitbird platform I use to access Twitter on my iPhone 4 is capable of "speaking" my Tweets to me, and apps such as iPadio already enable me to voice my blogs as opposed to write them.
As I say, I have no axe to grind. I like writing, and I like reading.
The only -- admittedly provocative -- question I'm asking here is whether today, in 2010, I need to do either?
And finally, for the finnicky, I chose to write this rather than video blog juste pour vous faites chier........